“Abandoned”

Today i remembered the time i had to learn to reverse a articulated truck as a teenager. This was likely before getting a conventional driving license. All of which set me off on a search to see it was possible to find the related patent that my father was granted… and it is!

It’s Patent US4784066A, which is handily available on Google with all the diagrams, one of which is below.

Don’t remember much about truck drivng beyond the unfeasibly numerous low gears, ridiculously long clutch, and how it was impossible to see anything at the back. It might be that someone else lined the thing up and my job was only to slowly reverse onto the railway tracks to couple with the boogie (technical talk!)

Out there somewhere is a short segment on the project that appeared on Tomorrow’s World. Periodically i go looking for an archive, but the BBC gave up adding things long ago… having written all that, it seems terribly familiar, and makes me worry that i’m repeating myself!