great read mm thanks for posting… what happened to the girlfriend…
mushroomman:
Dennis, I do remember seeing a bloke once on Shepherds Bush lorry park putting his sheets in the cab before he set off to his digs. You couldn’t drive over your sheets in the winter on Shepherds Bush as there was always more mud there than The Somme.
And I suppose that this can be classed as “Security Measures Back In The Day”. An old lad told me that he stayed in digs once and was advised to put two of the legs of the bed inside his boots, so they didn’t walk off during the night.Regards Steve.
There was digs in Tooley St where you had to do just that, better still keep your boots on ! 
Cheers Dennis.
Blimey BEWICK you are correct i used to stay in one just on tower bridge side left side going south or in the tooley street one ,all clothes on… there was a coffie /tea stall on the oppisite side… i was in that one the day the flats blew up in stratford/canning town something point,roma.?
m.a.n rules:
great read mm thanks for posting… what happened to the girlfriend…
Hopefully she married somebody much better than me and lived happily ever after. 
ah well not every story has a happy ending 
p.s. let’s have some more stories.
Who remembers checkpoint Drei Linden? Passed it couple of times lately (now in a very sorry state…) and wondered if thing’s were a tat better then at the notorious Helmstedt border…?
Cheers, Patrick
Another thing I’ve always found very interesting is what still remains of the former Avus race circuit, at some point back in the day, according to some information I’ve found, it was the most fastest and dangerous circuit in the world…?
Cheers, Patrick
Hello Patrick, I am afraid that I can’t remember anything about Drei Linden and after looking at your photos I did a bit more Google searching to see what else I could find. It seems that it was built in 1969 and so it should of been there three years later when we did our trip. I have a feeling that there was a lane just for Allied Service personnel as I can only remember the buildings as being wooden huts and we weren’t allowed to have contact with The East Germans.
I think that the Allies didn’t recognise the country of East Germany and we were told that if we were stopped by the police then we had to show them our Berlin Travel Document and tell them that we could only speak to a Russian Officer. The photos that you showed brought back memories because I remember seeing in later years on many occasions Commie Block cars being pushed. If they were queueing to cross a border or waiting at a garage to get some petrol they would always switch off the engine and wait. Once the queue moved they would all get out and push the car maybe five or six spaces forward, get back in and wait again. In the summer holidays when the East Germans who were lucky enough to own a car would set off to Lake Balaton in Hungary for there annual two weeks holiday, it was common to see at Zinnwald, the border with Czechoslovakia, about a two kilometre queue where throughout the day or night people would be pushing their Trabants every time the queue moved up just to save a drop of petrol.
I also didn’t know anything about that Avus race circuit and I would like to share a little story with you about another long lost German race circuit because if these kind of tales aren’t told then eventually they are all forgotten.
In 1953 the R.A.F. in Germany built a hospital in a little town called Wegberg which was not too far from the Dutch border and next to it was a ring road that we all called The Wegberg Ring. Now we were all told over the years that according to the locals Hitler built this road so that he could drive his Volkswagen, the peoples car around it.
I spent most of yesterday afternoon seeing if I could find out anything about this and there isn’t anything much about it on Google. So maybe it was just a rumour and if he did have a track like this built then why was there no mention of him driving around in a big Mercedes or maybe he did that in Berlin at the Avus circuit. 
The Wegberg Ring is now known as The Grenzelandring.
Cheers for filling in the “blind spots” and your spot on about that those tales need to be told to others before they’re being forgotten…
Didn’t know about that other race circuit either, must have passed that border several times, but never heard something about it from the locals…
It does raise the question what else was build during 1933 and the end of the war that we don’t know about…
Read a book once about a woman that grew up in East Germany after the war, quite staggering to read how all those people were being “brainwashed” by the propaganda…even after the wall came down, they still had faith in the old system…
Cheers, Patrick
Found some more pic’s from the Eisenach region (Herleshausen), from the time the A4 wasn’t built yet…?
These two pic’s are marked “Wartha”, was probably the DDR name of the border…? Been there couple of times, a few clicks further the Bell works are situated, parked up at the old border which is being converted into a services area, there used to be a special pub for drivers on the fourth storey, but that’s sadly closed now…the restaurant for “normal” people is still opened though…
Here is a picture of Eisenach taken in Sept 2015. En-route to Berlin.
Nice Raststaette now.
Nice one Gavin and a Merry Christmas to you, I just love your Hymer, can I borrow it.
Hi Patrick, yes Wartha was the East German side and Eisenach was the West German side of the Iron Curtain.
I love seeing those old black and white photos especially the ones of the autobahns some of which in the late sixties were still cobbled in parts. I remember that a number of what eventually became motorway service areas were, during the war, German Army barracks. In fact one place where I stopped once was an old windmill next to the autobahn which was taken over by the Y.M.C.A. after the war and was used by the British and the American Forces up until the early seventies. I can’t remember the name of it but was somewhere on the Cologne to Hannover Autobahn.
I have been looking at a couple of my old passports for a Wartha stamp but I can’t tell which date it was. Maybe the East Germans had a code to work out the date as I can’t tell which year it was on any of them.
There was another D.D.R. border that I had forgotten all about until just now and that was Zarrentin.
Thanks Mushy
Merry Christmas to you too.
GS
Hiya, found two images of Zarrentin, recognise any of it?
Talking of cobbled parts, although not cobbled it was back breaking though, when you drove up towards the Polish border at Pomellen on the A11, most of it wasn’t to bad, but there was a part somewhere in the middle if I remember correctly that literally was all about “shake, rattle and roll”… Haven’t been up there for quite some time now, hopefully they’ve laid down some new tarmac…
When you crossed the Polish border at Forst there was another piece of back breaking road, think that was about some 30miles long… one of the Polish ■■■■■■ pilots told me once that it was still the same road that was engineered by a certain mister A.Hitler… and that they haven’t got round to service and maintain it for some 60 odd years… I reckon that’s all changed now due to EU money…
Cheers, Patrick
GS OVERLAND:
Here is a picture of Eisenach taken in Sept 2015. En-route to Berlin.
Nice Raststaette now.
Aye, it’s not to bad eh, the schnitzel with pommes tasted allright 
You boys are just amazing the pictures you are digging up. Some real memory shakers in that last lot. It is incredible that we have lived, and worked as drivers, through the years of the wall and now you would hardly know anything was ever there. How things change.
Thank you all very, very much indeed for the hard work this involves.
David