No, never been to an eastern bloc country Patrick. Just as well I think. Doesn’t sound like it was all that pleasant. I just experienced the crossing of EU country borders before the open borders came in.
What is it like these days?
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The problem was pretty much over once you got into the pound… But some of those queues were over 40’ks long and that was days, which is why so many trucks went via Finland. There was only one border to cross and after that it was only control points… We used to go out through Slovenia, Hungary, and the Ukraine, which was against the main north south traffic, so border controls while still a bit tense were relatively unhindered… 40 mins to 4 hours… longer if you were in a hurry… straight through if you had time to kill…
I was looking at Rynarts road trains with the European trailers and I was thinking … Hmmmmmmm… I bet that twitches like a …twitchy thing… I haven’t driven European road trains… but I’ve been at the business end of a few Australian triples and BaB’s…
I’ll try and get this down with out confusing you or my self… hopefully Dig’ll come across this and might be able to explain it in a different way…
Road train trailers… the best ones have the bogies right at the rear and the pin as far forward as possible… that’s because of something called steering amplification, caused by rear end trailer swing… European trailers have their bogies a lot farther forward and a deep set pin so when you turn, the rear end of the trailer swings out the opposite way… if you have a Rockinger coupling at the rear of the trailer ( usually on the rear cross member ) then when the trailer swings about under natural road conditions ( bumps and undulations ) the rear end of the trailer will cover a greater swing distance ( say a foot or so ) if the bogie is farther forward.
If the bogie is farther back ( right at the rear ) and the pin as far forward as possible then the rear of the trailer hardly swings out at all so everything stays straight… Well sort of… If your barrelling down an unsealed road and look in the mirror on the none dusty side it’s not uncommon to see the trailers coming down the road on an arc… (You obviously not going fast enough )… Can you follow that ?
Jeff…
jsutherland:
No, never been to an eastern bloc country Patrick. Just as well I think. Doesn’t sound like it was all that pleasant. I just experienced the crossing of EU country borders before the open borders came in.What is it like these days?
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Only the border crossings were the downside of the job really, once you were in, all was good, but I reckon Vodka Cola Cowboy, Jelliot and Robert can tell you a bit more about those days…since I’m still being a young whippersnapper according to some you see 
The roads have improved for sure, if you haven’t been there for a while, you hardly recognise it anymore…but to be fair, the EU has paid for it, so one might expect sommat of it…?
Big difference is that all those former Sovjet countries seem to have their own form of road tax, you used to buy a vignet for a day, a week or longer, stick it on to your windscreen and that was that…but eventually the 21st century arrived as well over there…so they’ve all “invented” some sort of electronic device to get the money out of your (or the guv’s) pocket…the Polish and Czech system works best, as it is basically the same system the Austrians use…the Slovakian system however…quite different shall we say… Don’t know what they use in Hungary and Romania these days…
I will post some pic’s of the trips I’ve done lately to the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia if that’s alright with you Mick, don’t want to hijack your thread mate…
pv83:
jsutherland:
No, never been to an eastern bloc country Patrick. Just as well I think. Doesn’t sound like it was all that pleasant. I just experienced the crossing of EU country borders before the open borders came in.What is it like these days?
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Only the border crossings were the downside of the job really, once you were in, all was good, but I reckon Vodka Cola Cowboy, Jelliot and Robert can tell you a bit more about those days…since I’m still being a young whippersnapper according to some you see
The roads have improved for sure, if you haven’t been there for a while, you hardly recognise it anymore…but to be fair, the EU has paid for it, so one might expect sommat of it…?
Big difference is that all those former Sovjet countries seem to have their own form of road tax, you used to buy a vignet for a day, a week or longer, stick it on to your windscreen and that was that…but eventually the 21st century arrived as well over there…so they’ve all “invented” some sort of electronic device to get the money out of your (or the guv’s) pocket…the Polish and Czech system works best, as it is basically the same system the Austrians use…the Slovakian system however…quite different shall we say… Don’t know what they use in Hungary and Romania these days…
I will post some pic’s of the trips I’ve done lately to the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia if that’s alright with you Mick, don’t want to hijack your thread mate…
No Patrick, that will be great. Will be really interesting to see those photo’s. Obviously, getting to Russia was part of the job. For Jeff, he ran up from Italy through into the Ukraine and then into Russia and Kaz. For most of us running from the U.K. to Russia is was Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia. Of course the Dutch boys used this route as well and the German lads.
To answer your point Johnny, the problem was that all of the border crossings were too small, for the amount of traffic that was generated after the Berlin Wall came down. Most, although not all, had a single carriageway road approaching them. This had been fine up until 1992, when cross border traffic had been minimal. But, the dramatic increase in goods coming from the West, into the likes of Poland, Czech and Russia, overwhelmed these little borders.
Take Kukariki for instance. They had built this freight only border outside of Brest, to stop trucks from crossing at the town border. From the Polish side you approached it along a single carriage road. In 1990 and 91 there was virtually no traffic using it. I could drive straight into the border and clear it in an hour. But, the compound was small. When hundreds of trucks were trying to use it a queue formed on the old road. And as the number of imports increased the queues got longer and longer. In the end I could reach the back of the queue and know exactly how long it would take me to get into the compound. Could be 24 hours, or 36, or 48. There were no facilities so you had to cook and wash in the cab.
The border staff at Kukariki, who I knew very well, plodded away doing their job and as the amount of work that they had to do increased, they did not increase their work rate. They came in, did their shift and went home. They were not interested in the truck drivers in the queue.
Most trucks, whether they were East European or West European did not reload in Russia, in the early 1990s. So virtually all of the trucks coming back out of Kukariki were empty. But, because of the antiquated Soviet controls that they were using at the border, this caused a hold up and once again long queues built up coming back into Poland.
So, in order to beat this I switched borders and began to use Grodno. But, Grodno did not work at night, for trucks. That was because the Sovinteravtoservice hut did not have electricity. So, if you were not into the compound before it got dark, you had to wait for the morning. But, you got a good night’s sleep, as the queue was not shuffling up all night.
Then, others latched on to Grodno and that became busy so I switched again to Suwalki, from Lithuania into Poland. But, after a while the same happened there so I changed again and ran through Lithuania to the small Russian province of Kaliningrad. Much further West and a long way round, but nobody picked up on this border and I could run straight into it and be cleared and on my way within an hour. It was an extra hundred miles on the trip but the time that you saved by not queueing was brilliant.
Then, in 1993 Kepstowe started to use the M.V.Garden, from Harwich to Turku, in Finland. Then, if I had to run back from Moscow to the U.K. we would ship back out on that and run down to Moscow through the border at Valimaa, Leningrad and Novgorod. The boat trip took 3 days. We used to spend our time eating, drinking and sleeping. Much better than 3 days spent in border queues.
I seem to have missed an experience here. Not too sad to have missed the border crossing experience, but it would have been nice to have experienced the Eastern Bloc before it “modernized”.
Thanks to all for your replies. A different world for me.
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This would have been handy whilst queuing up at the border…
Cheers, Patrick
Some pic’s of a trip I’ve done last year, we were given the task to collect some vehichles for the armed forces, the lads finished a training session of 3 weeks, following footage is from the trip back home…
We’ve started at a camp in Adazi just north of Riga, and the route we’d followed was via the E67, E77, pass the ring road of Riga, back on the E77 all the way to Kryzkalnisn and from there on the A1 towards Klaipeda.
Now, that dual carriageway was quite good last time I went over it (some 20 years earlier, hopping along with me dad), but now even the smaller roads are in good shape as well and quite comfy to drive.
Every 5 miles or so there’s a petrol station…with absolute stunning lasses behind the till
Thanks for sharing the pictures Patrick. The roads look rather new. They sure must have made a big impact in a lorry drivers life, especially being able to make much better time in not having to be always on the alert for pot holes etc.
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Some great pictures there Patrick. Interesting how the roads have improved. The last time that I drove down from Moscow to Minsk, on my way to Grodno was in June 1995. That was when I left Moscow for good.
The motorway through Belarus ran from Brest as far as Borisov, just past Minsk. But for years they had been working on extending it towards Orsha. I wonder how far it reaches now. From Borisov to Moscow was all single carriageway then and the border post from Belarus to Russia were just the old Police posts, that they had in the Soviet era. No doubt they have built a proper border complex now.
robert1952:
Vodka Cola Cowboy:
yeah. The border queues killed the job.
In 1990 and 91 there were no queues. In fact, you could turn up at the border and find that you were the only one there. Or there may have been 2 or 3 other trucks.
Changing trailers at Siedlce to head back to Moscow, I knew exactly where I would get to that night for dinner. If I was early I could make Smolensk. If it was late it would be Minsk. Everything was predictable. You could do the border at Kukariki in less than an hour.
When the queues started they could be as long as 4 days to get into Belarus and 24 to 48 to get back out into Poland, at their worst.
You spent day after day cat napping over the wheel. Jumping those that fell asleep in front of you.
It ruined the job.And you are right, it really did ruin the job. All that nonsense of slumping over the wheel to catch another 20 minutes of sleep before manically overtaking any slumbering drivers at those Eastern European borders was a recipe for disaster - it was all sleep-deprivation, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, plot-loss stuff! In the mid-90s even the border at Shirnding/Pomezi (Germany/Czech Republic) was like this - 'king nightmare! I remember seeing Brit drivers spread-eagling themselves against the grilles of artics trying to overtake them on this border in a futile attempt to stop them getting in front. I have to say, I soon learnt to park up and claim my sleep before attempting these crossings even if it slowed the job down: I preferred to be fresh and ready for the next shift!
Robert
Yes, I totally agree with you Robert. As I said in the book, where I jumped up in Kiev and drove off, thinking that I was in the border queue at Kukariki and the queue had moved. That shook me into changing borders, to avoid the stress.
I remember very late at night going past the sleeping trucks waiting to get in to poland all i wanted to do was park at the [i think shell garage ] i was bushed, hoping no one was parked across the lane to block every one off…also another time the crash barrier had been removed and trucks were going down the wrong side of the duel track i had not enough bottle to do it,1989.knowing my luck i would have been the one to loose out and get sent back…
Finished the book today, a great read, well done on writing it.
Irish_neris:
Finished the book today, a great read, well done on writing it.
Thanks I.N. I am glad that you enjoyed it. Hopefully there will be another one coming out later in the year.
What’s that in the second to last pic Oily? Looks a bit like a Volvo FL series from the side…? No doubt it will be sommat Chinese…?
pv83:
What’s that in the second to last pic Oily? Looks a bit like a Volvo FL series from the side…? No doubt it will be sommat Chinese…?
It’s a Sinotruk Howo Patrick and yes it’s Chinese.
Oily
