Back when I first started, I was driving an ex Sammy Jones ERF with a 250 Cumming engine and a double bunk sleeper cab. The majority of our work was transporting coils of steel for Ford up and down the country. When I say coils, I should say one feckin' big 20 tonne coil in a "welled" trailer.
We would get down to Barking docks the night before and be first in the que the following morning and load direct from the ship. We would then take the coil back up to the West Midlands where the coil would then be unwrapped, covered in oil and have a layer of paper added in-between the wraps and rewrapped. A week or so later that same coil would be taken back down to Ford at Dagenham to be used for making car panels etc literally a couple of miles from where it first came into the UK........go figure??
At least once a week and this was before the M25 was built, we used to have to go to Ford at Croydon from the West Midlands. The North and South circular roads were far to congested so the only option was to go straight through the centre of London. I couldn't imagine doing that these days, nor would I want to!!!
The sleeper cabs had a huge rear window and we had a fleet of flat bed trailers so reversing was easy, just open the curtain and back you go...
However, I then swapped jobs and went to work for Christian Salvesen driving 40' fridges using day cab Mercs and no rear windows and oh boy that was a shock. Especially some of the Sainsbury's supermarkets that we were expected to reverse into blind side, crazy.
