Telecom shite

[quicksilver]

Just stumbled across this fascinating collection of old shite operated by Post Office Telephones/BT over the years and thought I'd share:

http://www.britishtelephones.com/vehicles.htm

Go to the Minor Vans section for Marinas, HAs and Maestros or the Specialist Vehicles section to see some really weird and wonderful stuff!

[wackywacerwill]

Pure class

[e287yba]

Pure class

 

There's a Telephone Museum in Milton Keynes - that Roadphone (above) was there 2 years ago. Interesting place, with a mock up of a small olde worlde exchange using pulse dialling from the phones inside the museum which punters can use, as well as a lot of historical stuff including some vehicles.

 

(There was also a "Lawnmower Event" at the venue that day as well - this I didn't get...)

[Timewaster]

What a great site! Brings back memories of the various GPO / BT chod that Fatha Tops used to bring home.

 

One question springs to mind, How F***kin bad must a Bedford HA have been?

"A much better vehicle than the Bedford Viva HA which became the main stay of the fleet at this time."

 

I remember him having a '79 HA and saying it did "0-60 from here to Stretham" which was about 6 miles

[eddyramrod]

HA? Ahem...

Not very fast, noisy and basic, but very light so you can hustle them a bit. RWD for the drift win, obviously! I can see how the Marina van would have seemed like quite an advance from this.

[freebird]

I actually had an Ex Telecom HA van, the first vehicle i ever drove after i passed my test, long before I was given an Ital van, which was supposed to be an Improved Marina, when i joined British telecom back in 89.

Ive got to say that the HA was ten zillion times better than the Ital van in every department apart from out and out performance.

I dont remember anybody liking Ital vans and we all used to look enviously at the engineers that had been given Maestro vans.

I had to wait till August 90 for my brand new Maestro van ( facelifted from the earlier ones) and it was fuggin brilliant in everyway.

It truly was the Rolls Royce of small vans back then.

Amazingly enough, when the first Escort Diesel vans were being trialled and finally became standard issue ( generally J plate onwards) we all wanted one of them because they were the Rolls Royce of light vans or summat.

Yep, we really were fickle bastards.

I never got one, my Maestro had to be chopped in with an Installers Sherpa box van as I and many of my collegues were being multi skilled.

Fortunately i managed to kill two of them off within a few months so that i ended up with a Transit box van ( single wheel) to blat about in and, occassionally, have off the clock on certain major A roads...

Thery were the days.....before the c**ts decided to fit trackers to every fucking van/truck/Hoist/camel that moves.

[mattblack]

Don't know if it's an urban myth, but I was told many years ago that the Telecom HA's were fitted with a restrictor plate in the inlet manifold.

[freebird]

Don't know if it's an urban myth, but I was told many years ago that the Telecom HA's were fitted with a restrictor plate in the inlet manifold.

Its not.

Well, I dunno about restrictor plates but I was told that the inlet manifolds were "drilled" and something was done to restrict performance.

IIRC, this was also done to Minors before HAs took over.

To demonstate how utterly tight they were, when we started getting "proper" vans with radios and stuff, the company wanted Fords to supply them without such luxuries, on the assumption that it would bring costs down.

I think it was decided that it would cost more to remove all the goodies than to leave them in place.

Todays vans are restricted to 70MPH because, as we all know, this will save the environment, stop us choking to death a la Linda lovelace and all the lickle Polar Bears will have lots of ice to live on or summat.

[Cavcraft]

I very briefly owned an ex-Telecom Ital van once. I swapped it for a really badly built, half arsed 4x3 trailer. It transpires the trailer was actually better made than the van so I sold post haste to a mate who, for some reason best known to him, still talks to me.

[freebird]

I very briefly owned an ex-Telecom Ital van once. I swapped it for a really badly built, half arsed 4x3 trailer. It transpires the trailer was actually better made than the van so I sold post haste to a mate who, for some reason best known to him, still talks to me.

Aye, those vans were shockers!!!

When my one went for its MOT/Service, they found that much wrong with it it was pulled out of service and given scrap status.

That was for a 5/6 year old van with just about 60,000 miles of light use.

In saying that, as hideous to drive as they were, id never kick one out of the garage. Id deffo keep one so that, occassionally, i could get it out and go for a spin in it just to understand that authentic feeling of driving something that felt like it had been designed and built in the 1950s.......

[RedSparrow]

My dad had an ex-BT Maestro, couldn't rate it highly enough. I think they were popular cos they were a massive leap forward from the Marinas/Itals they replcaed and people didn't care about the somewhat frumpy looks on a commercial vehicle.

Sadly my dads one was nicked by a disgruntled ex-employee and smashed to pieces.

[warren t claim]

The whole BT empire is still underpinned with shit commercial vehicles. I worked for the Chester maintenance depot recently and 15 year old commercial vehicles are still commonplace.

 

It's a little known fackt that 90% of BT exchanges aren't licensed for full time occupancy and other than the occasional engineer coming in to work on the frame or to collect something from their dropbox they're almost always empty. This means that any shiter desperate for some short term storage for some heap lacking in tax or insurance may use their carpark with little chance of a kicking off Buzby.