OneGuyFromBarlick

Trafficators...known as flippers in Mrs Tiz's family. Some of you may remember the traffic policeman who stood at the junction at the top of Church Street and Darwen Street in Blackburn in the early 1950s. There's a story in my family that Dad drove Little Mary (our Austin 7) up Darwen Street, came to the junction and the policeman put up his hand and stopped us. I was sitting on my Mum's knee on the front seat (as children did then) with a good view and, naturally, thought the bobby was waving at me so I waved back. It brought a smile to his face!

Tiz, if you think back to the Austin 7 there was a small handle at the bottom of the windscreen. You could open the screen in hot weather or, as my dad used to do, to get a better view in fog. It was also good for poking a shotgun out and shooting rabbits in the headlights. My mate and I used to shoot rabbits like this in his Austin Ruby until I blew his radiator thermometer off the filler cap.... He was not pleased!

Another thing we tend to forget about the old vehicles was that the drum brakes were cable and rod operated and were totally inadequate. During the war when many American GM trucks were in the country they were fitted with very efficient air brakes and had to have a sign on the rear saying 'Air Brakes' to warn drivers behind that they were liable to stop much more efficiently that the following cars.

Yes, and it gave them the confidence to drive so fast that it frightened the locals!

Yes but remember that they were comparing the American's speed to the normal wagons which were limited by law to 20mph and could be much slower on a hill as they were grossly underpowered. On long drags like Shap or Beattock you couldn't overtake and so you were limited to the speed of the slowest. 15mph was good progress! This was still true in the late 1950s when I started driving.

This was typical on the last nip up to the summit on Shap Fell in the 1960s even when there was no snow. The speed was that of the slowest, look how close the wagon is to the car.....

One of those wagons has an advert on the back for `Black Boy' - what was that? I did a search on google but it didn't come up with any products from the past with that name. Curiously, there are some products called Black Boy now, which I thought might have been banned by the thought police.

I think it was tea.

The bloke on the back of the van looks like he is polishing shoes.

Here is an advert for Black Boy Tips Tea.
LINK

That's the bloke Wendy!

Samuel Noble manufactured jute sacks & bags in Liverpool, I've found a reference in a Dundee newspaper (1953) about him being made chairman of a jute industry organisation. I'd have to subscribe to genes reunited to read any more, but I wonder if the lorry is returning from Dundee loaded up with sacking?

As well as jute that area was known for flax in the old days. I once visited the Scotts porridge oat mill in Cupar and found that it was originally a flax mill. Quaker took over Scotts but made Cupar their main base and the mill is now said to be one of the biggest and most modern oat mills in Europe.
http://www.scottsporage.co.uk/the-scott ... -heritage/

Yes it was Black Boy Tips Tea. Does anyone remember Mazawattee Tea?
The wagon carrying sacking could have been coming down from Dundee. Notice that he is roped and sheeted on a flat bed and It's an Atkinson wagon built at Walton le Dale. Roping and sheeting is a lost art these days but we took a lot of pride in a tidy job.



Eight courses of hay in soft bales for Dick Lancaster at Paradise Farm Horton in Craven. About 5 tons weight and it was an art stacking them square and keeping them that way on the road. There are 11 ropes on this load and if you were wise you stopped on the way back and re-tightened them all as the load settled. They laughed at me for roping the first four courses separately as I was loading but I never had a load move... (You were very careful on the bends as well!)

The worse load I had in terms of stability was a regular job I used to have carrying high class hardwood out of Glicksten's in Stratford, East London. The loads were high and heavy, I used to put ten tons on. The foreman in the yard was notably bad tempered but he was a good man to me because I asked his advice on loading when I first went there. He showed me how to rope at half height and recommended I get some chains. I got Jimmy Thompson to make me two sets with tighteners and they were just the job. I remember that when I went round the roundabout at Mill Hill on the way out of London there was a very bad camber and my god, did she lean! Cracking and banging out of the flat and the springs but it never shifted. I remember the veneer logs that were so dense they almost sank in the water and the smalls that wafted over from the Yardley's works next door.
I once took a load of teak up to a boat builder's yard on Lake Windermere and asked him what he used the vary heavy timbers for. He laughed and said that they rived them into 4" planks before they used them. Another interesting place I delivered the high class timber to (it went mostly for furniture and high class shop and bar fitting) was Remploy at Leicester. The wood was in small random sizes and they used to carry it into the works one piece at a time. They were all disabled and I marvelled at people with limbs missing taking what they could handle and carrying it in. Good places and of course almost all gone now, not economical.....

In those days we took anything we could get as a load and sometimes it could be quite dodgy. I once took a tractor-loader from London to Liverpool and I was glad to get it off at the other end. All the weight up in the air and concentrated on two bearers under the flat! Worst was a bottle washer from Accrington to Aberystwyth. Reckoned to be nine tons but when I got it on I found it was full of cullet (broken glass). Must have been about twelve tons. I broke both back springs on the journey down there and had to come back empty.... Happy days!

The thing that constantly amazes me when I look back is how we managed with engines that were definitely underpowered. This applied even to the expensive wagons. The Guy eight legger ran at 28 tons and had a 120hp Gardiner 6LW in it. Lots of four wheelers like the Guy Otter had the LW3 engine, 60hp! In those days a four wheel wagon was allowed 14 tons gross, so the Bedford TK I had, at four tons unladen, was legal with ten tons on the flat. The Bedford diesel engine was 90hp new out of the factory and many a time I had to go the long way round to avoid a steep hill! Modern drivers would laugh at this. The old canard about reversing up steep hills only applied to very old vehicles. The bottom gear in the Bedford four speed gearbox was the same ratio as reverse so you could forget that one!

That makes me think about railway steam tank locomotives - am I right in thinking they could only go one way (backwards or forwards?) when on an incline because if it was the wrong way around the water wouldn't feed into the boiler?

Tiz, if the water level in the tank was low enough this applies to all locos and traction engines. The shorter the machine the more likely it would apply. Traction engines had another problem on a steep downhill incline, the water in the boiler ran forwards and left the crown of the firebox dry exposing the fusible plug. The answer was to know the road and ensure the boiler was full to the top. That led to another danger, priming and getting a slug of water in the cylinder, equally as damaging!

I've mentioned before how bad wagon brakes were in the early days. As late as the 1968 Transport Act we were running wagons with braking systems so bad that in some cases the handbrake was better than the foot-brake! The golden rule in those days that you went downhill in the same gear that you used to go up and you got a situation where on bad hills like the first downhill after the summit on Shap coming South the traffic moved as slowly as the vehicles coming uphill. This brought its own problems as a well worn gearbox had a distressing tendency to jump out of gear on the over-run unless you physically held it in gear. I often wonder how modern drivers would cope.
I've just remembered two systems that came in to supplement the main brakes. One was the 'Jake Brake', an American system invented by Jacobson's in which you could alter the valve timing and convert the engine into an air compressor. Very seldom used in the UK. The other later system which is still popular on high end passenger coaches was the Telma Retarder which was an AC generator incorporated in the drive train. You activated it by switching a small electrical current into the exciter of the alternator and it became a very powerful generator. The energy produced was dissipated as heat. I never saw this used on wagons as by the time it had come in brake efficiency had increased. ( see THIS for a better explanation of how they work)

My last wagon, the ERF with trailer, had superb brakes. It was a full Westinghouse Principle three line air pressure system. All the brakes had a powerful spring unit on operating cams which forced the shoes into contact with the drums. All the linings and drums were of generous size and well on top of their job. The system worked by the normal state being that the springs forced the brakes on and it was the sir pressure that overcame the springs and took the brakes off. When you braked using any of the three separate systems, you released air from the circuit and the springs forced the brakes on. This meant that they were fail safe, any deficiency in the air supply applied the brakes. You could lock all four axles at any time.
The trailer brakes could be operated independently of the wagon and this was very useful in bad road conditions. The' hand brake' locked all four axles. Compared to the old brakes this was driver's heaven!

Stanley wrote: When you braked using any of the three separate systems, you released air from the circuit and the springs forced the brakes on. This meant that they were fail safe, any deficiency in the air supply applied the brakes.

No that isn't entirely correct. Sorry. It only applied to the parking brake circuit and the fail safe if you had low air pressure which operated from the spring brakes.

When the driver pushes on the brake pedal, it directs pressurized air through hoses into the braking mechanism. Most trucks use foundation brakes. In foundation brakes, the pressurized air pushes out a piston which moves a cam, pushing a brake shoe into a rotating drum. The drum is attached to a wheel and when the brake shoe rubs against it, it creates friction, slowing the wheel down. When the brakes are released, some pressurized air is released from the system and the compressor has to store new air to keep the brakes powered.

Spring Brakes

Trucks also have a backup system called spring brakes. If the compressor should fail or the braking system should begin to leak, it will make the service brakes inoperable. If that happens, the spring brakes will automatically stop the truck. Spring brakes are powered by a heavy-duty spring mechanism inside the brake chamber. This mechanism is normally held back by the air pressure in the system. If that air pressure drops too low, the spring brake system will engage, activating the brake drums. When the driver puts on the parking brake, the spring brakes are what holds the truck in place, preventing it from rolling away.



Read more : http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5747300_do ... work_.html

Sorry China but that's wrong. In the three line system which was later superseded by the current two line system, air pressure never applied the brakes, it was reducing pressure in the system that held the spring brakes off which applied the brakes. The two line system was cheaper and less complicated and as I never worked with it I can't comment on how that worked but in the case of the three line system the only mechanical connection with the cams that applied the brakes was the rod from the spring unit. There was no other mechanical connection from air cylinders or anything else. Funnily enough the trailer had a mechanical hand brake but I could never see the point of it because it had spring brakes as well and as soon as the pressure was released by detaching the Susies the wheels locked. It may be that this was fitted for use with two line systems. The only way you could move a trailer with spring brakes in the absence of an air supply was to manually retract the spring brake rods using a jacking nut on top of the unit.

Perhaps I only drove the modern tackle. But there was 3 line braking and some of the trucks were fitted for drawbar trailers. When you released the brake pedal you could hear the air vent.
Maybe the Westinghouse system was different from the others.

At this point in our careers China we don't have to worry too much about how the different systems worked! I remember once hearing about a very early attempt to apply an external force as a servo to old fashioned mechanical rod brakes. It involved a strop that tightened on a pully on the drive shaft and had one major problem. Once applied it locked in place and had to be released manually!