One of my first trips was driving a newer bus Gordon.
Normally either the driver or courier has had some experience, but on this trip it was not to be. It was more or less my first trip around Europe and my Courier was Max off my training trip from a few weeks earlier. We got lost everywhere and Max was just reading all the blurb for each place out of a book he managed to buy.
We were lucky as one of the girls on the bus spoke fluent Italian so we were fine getting her to ask for directions in Italy which happened a lot.
When got to Brindisi they were having a 3 day strike on the ferry so we got delayed there heading for Corfu.
I did learn to read maps fairly quickly after that trip plus one of the guys that was leaving the company gave me a stack of maps and a couple of guide books so I was grateful for that help.
After the Russia Scandi trip I applied for a job driving at Top Deck Travel. First I was told I had to do a training trip. I was told that there was a Spain, Portugal Morocco trip leaving the following day which gave me very little time to get a visa for Spain and Portugal.
We left the following morning with a fantastic bunch of passengers. I shared the driving on the entire trip and just as well got to know my way around that trip as I ended up doing 6 of them over the future 2 years.
We began at the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona Span so it was a quick trip down to Pamplona BUT, we hit a snag as soon as wen crossed to Calais. We were told by a friendly cop we needed new front tyres, so off we go and get that done before continuing on.
Pamplona is a bit like Oktoberfest in Munich, all the Top Deck buses turn up. We had a Top Deck Picnic day whilst there where each bus had their own 30 litre Sangria Mix.
All went well and we stocked up on 100 dozen cans of San Miguel beer for our time in Morocco as the beer there is horrible. Along the way we got Ice almost everywhere and kept the esky full as and when we could. There was an honesty chart with everybody’s names and they would tick off each beer they had. All totalled up including the ice and the missing beers not accounted for and each person paid towards the end of the trip.
We got to Barcelona and had engine issues. The driver and I did a full engine rebuild in the Barcelona campsite. This turned out to be a learning experience as later I had to do similar to a different bus.
We got back to London and was given a bus to do a Russia Scandi in which broke down in Berlin. I was then given a Beerfest trip and during that trip at Munich was switched to another bus to do a 7 Week Europe and I was on that bus for several more trips after that.
In June 1981 I did a 6½ week Russia Scandi coach camping trip. A lot of booze was consumed over the period with 23 passengers on board a coach and the driver and courier.
First we crossed over on the ferry to Europe then did Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, then worked our way up the coast to Hammerfest, and back down the Finland side Rovaniemi, Helsinki, Lenningrad, Kalinin, Moscow, Smolensk, MinskWarsaw, Prague, Berlin, Cologne and back to London
We got off to a great start by buying 100 dozen of Elephant Beer on the ferry (which later got us an overloading fine in Norway, so we had to drink faster)
In Amsterdam we did all the usual things that I revisited many times later such as Red Light area, live shows, Banana bar and several other seedy establishments.
Up at Hammerfest we went out on the North Sea fishing and caught more fish than we could eat in a month, in spite of the ice cold weather.
At the Artic circle on the Norway side the snow was higher than the bus where a snow plough had kept it clear.
Coming down the Finland size he had a night in a campsite with Saunas, that was fantastic.
In Berlin the campsite backed onto the Berlin Wall, looking over the fence we could see guards with machine guns. At the camp was the usual beer boot party and 120 bottles of Kuemerling. We did a day trip across Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin and about a 20 minute walk to the Berlin Tower and had a meal in the revolving restaurant at the top.
In Prague it was the first time our courier had been there and whilst changing money on the black market we ended up with counterfiet notes which was not ideal.
We did visit Auschwitz which was a real eye opener. We had a guide and were shown the huge buildings with specticles, bags, shoes and we were also shown the area where they were set up as showers and were in fact gas chambers. Quite a sad place to visit.
I will be in Berlin again this year (2024) and have booked a table at the same Tower Restaurant some 40 years later.
A fantastic trip but I have not managed to get back in contact with anyone off that trip since.
I went back to Western Australia in 1980 and the job at Bell Bros this time was on a roading section near De Gray river which incorporated the approcaches to a new bridge. On this job I was in 85 ton dump trucks and a bit of time on a couple of big loaders.
After this job it was off to the Leslie Salt job building new salt evaporation ponds. On this job I was mainly on an elevator scraper which was one of several on site that we also had at the Wallal Downs road job with Bell Bros a year or so earlier.
Two Cat 623b’s Elevator Scrapers
SC23 stripping topsoil. A dusty job with the odd snake thrown up on the back of the cab.
In 1978 a friend Marvin and his Wife Julie and I decided to go over to Western Australia. We both had caravans and we had to stop in at a transport yard in Narrabri and spend a week helping weld up cracks on trailers. A bloke from home had been staying with me in my caravan in Brisbane and he came along also.
We spent about two weeks driving with only one small issue when I had a wheel bearing on my caravan fail at Broken Hill. With Marvin’s help as a self taught mechanice we fixed that fairly quickly but the hardest thing had been sourcing the correct size wheel bearing. That stop cost us about half a day.
Neither car had roo bars so we avoided driving at night and with the big open roads across from South Australia to Perth was easy going. We did have a quick stop and a look around Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie but had no plans to work or stay there.
The trip over we managed to cook in the caravans and stop in various rest areas and managed to have the odd shower at roadhouses along the way.
When we got to Perth we stayed at the camp ground and each day made enquiries about getting jobs up in the mines in the North West. After a few weeks we had all managed to secure jobs in three different locations.
My first Job was at Wittenoom and at the time I did not know it but it was home to an old Asbestos Mine which had recently been closed down. My job was driving a loader and a truck at times working on covering up areas that had asbestos dust. NOTE: Wittenoom has now been removed from most maps and signposts removed and in theory no longer exists.
I lasted there a few weeks then went to Tom Price and got a job there on a Cat D9H dozer with Bell Bros. I walked into Bell’s office and the guy was on the phone looking for a D9H operator. I had driven a small D4 a bit at home and thought how hard could it be? So when he was finished on the phone I told him I had operated a D9G and a 631 Cat scraper and he gave me a job.
I was taken up to the dozer by the fitter and it was all a bit of a mystery at first. I spent a whle looking around it and checking the oils and water etc then got in and soon figured out how to start it, a lot easier than the old D4. All I had to do was rip and push rock ofer a rock face all day, a nice easy job indeed. My job in New Zealand I had driven lots of different loaders and machines but nothing this big apart from a scraper at Twizel for a few weeks.
They had a contract at Tom Price and it was slowly coming to an end. A few weeks after I began there my dozer got shipped off to another job and I moved onto a Hough loader loading ballast railway wagons for Hammersley Iron, then that got shipped off to Perth. I was then on a smaller Cat loader doing the same job until that also got shipped away. My final job was in the workshop building a bullbar for the bosses Toyota Landcruiser, after that the job at Tom Price ended. My boss got me transferred to another job on a Cat scraper on a 50 mile section of a roading job north of Port Hedland at Wallal Downs, about halfway between Port Hedland and Broome.
Mine was the only scraper on site that was not Air Conditioned and in the hot temperatures I did manage well. I later went onto a dozer when it’s operator left and a few months after that I told them I was going to Europe. A few days after I told them a brand new dozer arrived which was a bit bigger and my old D9 was off to another job. At the time they asked me to stay and by then I had everything booked. I was given a letter of reference stating that there would always be a job for me and they would fly me back from anywhere in the world.
Welding trailers at Narrabri
Tom Price Hammersley Iron
DZ22 my first D9H job at Tom Price
The new Fiat-Allis 31 I got to replace the old Cat D9
When I left New Zealand in July 1977 I flew to Brisbane. After a couple of days looking for a truck driving job without sucess I called a friend at Dalby and he told me to come out there.
I went as far as Toowomba on the bus and stopped off there and got myself a car and caravan and continued on to Dalby. At first i stayed in the Dalby camping ground but later Marvin and Julie had me move my caravan to the back of their place and looked after me a lot then.
I first got a job at an engineering place and after a few weeks I got a job driving trucks. The job was a combination of livestock around Queensland and a lot to and from Dalby sale yards to Brisbane abbatoirs and Gladstone abbatoirs. After a few weeks I was to take a trailer into Brisbane and load it for Darwin, the following day the same thing, then hooked the two trailers together and off to Darwin I went. 2500 miles.
During my time there I did three trips to Darwin and only broke down once, but a few flat tyres on each trip which was common back then. I broke a driveshaft on one hill coming back from Darwin and had to wait in a layby for about a week in the middle of nowhere on one of our other company trucks to bring me a new driveshaft.
Driving my last trip back from Darwin we were at the early stages of the wet season and coming from Cloncurry to Winton the Kynuna to Winton section was gravel or dirt road at the time and myself and two other road trains had to negotiate a lot of very big sections of water over that 100 miles (160km). We had the three trucks attached together with straight bars so if one had traction issues the other two would be pulling or pushing. I was in front and there were a couple of areas where we just made it, but it was quite an adventure. Normally this section was dry and badly corrugated which made for a slow trip indeed.
100 Ton of Bridge Beams leaving Darwin 1977
Coming back to Dalby start of the wet season
Loading with 3 decks of cattle. Try backing one of these:-)
