Oldest Working Taxi

[warren t claim]

About the Fairway concerned. 

It was a very tidy L reg example painted in a fetching, or maybe retching, flat green. As you may know, the FX4/Fairway was fitted with headlamps from the classic Mini which made a previous owner fit those fucking chrome peaks to them. 

[LightBulbFun]

6 minutes ago, warren t claim said:

Let us start with what the man is like himself. Billy is a wealthy eccentric. He's a 73 year old alcoholic teddy boy with a soft spot for dogs, his garage has several purpose built kennels to accommodate dogs in need of a new home.

Alternative title: the Untold stories of @Cavcraft

7 minutes ago, warren t claim said:

He then leads us to three cabs under dustcovers. He pulls the sheet back on one of them to reveal an M reg, 1974 FX4 with 200 miles on the clock, the other two undercover are the same! At the time he was trying to force WBC to issue plates for them as when he first started his legal challenge they would have been acceptable for plating! Sadly, as I've never seen these on the road I can only assume he lost this case as they are not wheelchair friendly.

on a more serious note, would love to know what became of those, where they registered or still un-registered? if they where registered, id love to know their reg marks so I could try and look em up if you remember em still! 

3 minutes ago, warren t claim said:

About the Fairway concerned. 

It was a very tidy L reg example painted in a fetching, or maybe retching, flat green. As you may know, the FX4/Fairway was fitted with headlamps from the classic Mini which made a previous owner fit those fucking chrome peaks to them. 

knowing you and the stories you have! Im half expecting you to then tell us a story of how you stabbed a mean taxi inspector or bad customer in the arse with one by driving your cab into them LOL

[warren t claim]

Other than that it was pretty standard, the only other deviation from factory spec was the fitment of a driver's seat stolen from a Series 2 XJ6. 

My original plan was to buy a cheaper Fairway for a grand less but as that had never been plated in my council before it'd cause some issues regarding the fitment of seat belts for the rear facing jump seats. The Fairway I bought had been used as a "placeholder" for a Wirral plate and therefore I'd have no issues swapping my plate over. 

At the time there were still a fair few Fairway hacks working Wirral but mine was one of the tidiest. 

This was the first time I'd worked a "classic" London taxi so my first port of call was to rank up at the Wallasey Liscard cab rank. As sad as it sounds, I did this to achieve a childhood ambition of reaching out of the driver's window of my cab and reaching back to open the OSR door for a passenger! The Liscard rank is an offside loading rank which makes that possible. 

[warren t claim]

5 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

 

on a more serious note, would love to know what became of those, where they registered or still un-registered? if they where registered, id love to know their reg marks so I could try and look em up if you remember em still! 

 

Therin lies the problem for Billy Kelly. He made the mistake of registering them, on a 1974 M plate IIRC, and they're sitting there under wraps in his garage with a couple of hundred miles on the clock. If he hadn't have registered them he could have got them plated for public hire use.

[Missy Charm]

Thanks for the memories @warren t claim!  Great set of reminiscences.  

Anyway, I've been a passenger in plenty of black cabs, both classic and Metrocab type, and can't tell you anything much about either.  Used to be fun getting a coloured one, rather than the standard issue though.  

[warren t claim]

A lot is said about the cramped cockpit of the FX4/Fairway and to be honest, most of that is bullshit. I'm 6,2" with long legs and managed to fit OK. The first thing that surprises a Fairway newbie is the ignition and steering lock, it's located under the steering column. Once turned you can head off on your way. If you're a first time hack driver then at this point you'll find a quiet road and see what all the fuss is about regarding the turning circle. Looking around in front of the partition you'll notice a couple of things. Firstly is the rope to close the NSF door. This is there to shut the door if a passenger has left it open after using the space beside you, known as "the box", to put luggage in. Secondly, unless you have a Gold spec Fairway, you'll see that only the NSF door has an electric window, the other windows are sash type pull down types. 

[warren t claim]

One unusual Fairway quirk is the heater. Yes it has an alright heater but after a decade or so the lever to adjust the heat on the dash fucks up. This means that to adjust the temperature inside the cab the driver has to open the bonnet and twat the valve on the matrix with either a set of mole grips or his favourite torturing pliers.

[HMC]

I had m977myk in about 2012 straight from service in london; it seems to have some sort of pop art / dc comic afterlife….

[warren t claim]

The FX4/Fairway left the factory with rust protection that would shame a Lancia Beta. You know that if you see a Ford KA with rot around the fuel filler cap or an XJ40 with bulkhead corrosion you know that despite appearances it's too far gone? Well, the FX4/Fairway has a similar giveaway sign. If you push down on the join on the front wings and hear a rusty crunching sound then turn around and walk away.

[warren t claim]

Anything else you want to know?

[Leyland Worldmaster]

2 hours ago, warren t claim said:

Anything else you want to know?

How much did the later FX4 share with me TX1? 

To a casual observer, they looked as though they shared axles and driveline components... 🤔

[warren t claim]

2 minutes ago, Leyland Worldmaster said:

How much did the later FX4 share with me TX1? 

To a casual observer, they looked as though they shared axles and driveline components... 🤔

Almost all of the running gear.

[High Jetter]

3 hours ago, warren t claim said:

Anything else you want to know?

Yeah, where you been? How's the garage going, and that young" lad?

[warren t claim]

On 4/7/2023 at 6:24 PM, LightBulbFun said:

Alternative title: the Untold stories of @Cavcraft

on a more serious note, would love to know what became of those, where they registered or still un-registered? if they where registered, id love to know their reg marks so I could try and look em up if you remember em still! 

knowing you and the stories you have! Im half expecting you to then tell us a story of how you stabbed a mean taxi inspector or bad customer in the arse with one by driving your cab into them LOL

Here's the legend that is Billy Kelly and Max (RIP Max). When I was taking the Fairway I bought from Billy to be tested Billy insisted Ex_Mrs_Claim and myself take Max along for the ride. The MOT tester shit himself when he opened the rear door of the Fairway so he could inspect the seats and seatbelts only to be greeted to the sight of a snarling Max!

 

And here's a current Google Earth view of Billy's yard in Liverpool.  Those cabs you can see aren't Fairways, the majority of them are FX4s! A good many of them were ex London cabs judging by the adverts I saw on the interior jump seats.  Billy keeps his most prized cabs indoors.

[warren t claim]

Billy, as you've probably already guessed is one of life's eccentrics. A self confessed alcoholic, he often used to spend the night asleep on a makeshift bed in his office. This is despite him owning a house in the poshest part of Wirral worth well into seven figures even though his neighbours complain about his home looking like it's owned by "tinkers and diddycoys".  Billy has managed to amass enough money that he can afford not to give a fuck about anything. As he loves dogs, he spent a fortune building kennels to house stray dogs at his yard. 

Here's where you'll have to follow closely as I'm going to get a bit legal here. Wirral used to limit the number of hack plates issued to 124 which meant that a plate was worth about £11,000 plus the value of whatever cab it was screwed on to. Billy at the time had something like 20 Wirral plates kept "on the shelf". Although a plate owner can't keep a hack plate unused, it has to be assigned to a cab, Billy got around this by once a year sending 20 of his Liverpool plated cabs to be tested and licenced on Wirral to keep those plates alive. There's no way he'd use those Wirral and Liverpool plated cabs to work on Wirral because a Liverpool hackney plate was worth about £35,000 at the time and therefore the cost to rent a hack in Liverpool was something like £250 a week for either a day or night shift.  Liverpool still has a limited number of hackney plates, currently 1,426, which isn't many for such a large city. Billy, along with other Liverpool hackney fleet owners like Atkinsons an George Gawith, made his millions when Liverpool City Council decided to increase it's hackney fleet from something like 600 cabs back in the early 80s. LCC offered every one of its licenced hackney drivers a free hack plate if they were willing to buy a new or newish cab. Fleet owners like Billy offered to supply a cab on the cheap to those drivers who had no interest in buying their own cab as long as he could hold the rights to the plate.

Meanwhile on Wirral back in 1989, Billy decided to challenge WBC demanding "significant unmet demand" meaning that he should be entitled to a free Wirral hackney plate. Back in 2007 he showed me the legal paperwork regarding his ongoing court battle and the paperwork must have weighed at least a hundredweight. By 2003 WBC were fucking sick of spending a fortune in legal fees fighting against Billy so used something that was the new in thing with licencing authorities at the time, The James Button guidelines to taxi licencing law. This basically involved send all of us drivers a questionnaire and then ignoring whatever answers we replied with and delimiting the number of Wirral hack plates. 

An hack owner driver should have seen this coming when WBC refused to plate something called the Eurocab for hackney use after only three were plated. The Eurocab was based on the 2002 Peugeot Expert and was priced at about half the cost of a new TX1. Wirral Council knew that they were going to start issuing new hack plates  to anyone prepared to buy a hack under three years old and fearing a backlash from those current Wirral hack owners decided to remove approval for the Eurocab so the barrier to entry would be significantly higher. The one exception to the rule regarding issuing a new hack plate to anyone willing to buy a hack less than three years old was Billy. As he started his legal battle with WBC back in 1989 he won the rights to plate any approved hackney that would have been less than three years old at the time he started his fight against WBC. This is how he managed to get a brand new issue plate and put it on a C reg Metrocab. He did continue his legal wrangle with WBC to try and get his three early 70s FX4s issue plates as well but he lost that argument because as they were already registered they didn't qualify as new cabs. The council tried to also argue on the wheelchair access requirements that the FX4 lacks but lost that battle because at the time there was still a 1972 L plate FX4 automatic still working on Wirral. 

Billy being Billy, he didn't give a flying fuck about supply and demand and put this C reg Metrocab up for rent at £350 a week including insurance despite that being well overpriced at the time. Before I decided to take the plunge and buy a hack myself back in 2005 I rented the Joni Mitchell Big Yellow Taxi (a manual Bronze spec TX1) for £230 a week including insurance which was dear even then! X918UMB where are you now? Probably recycled into a fridge door. 

Anyway, back to the story. In 2006 my Metrocab was off the road with starting/charging problems for the umpteenth time and I needed to find a rental hack fast to keep earning. Lack of choice meant that I'd have to cross the River Mersey and introduce myself to Billy. As Billy is making enough money with his Liverpool plated cabs he could afford to keep his C reg Wirral plated Metrocab insured and sitting dormant until someone (me) is desperate enough to pay his somewhat elevated asking price. After a friendly handshake I asked Billy how much to rent a Wirral plated cab. He told me that it was £50 a day so I enquired how much to rent it for the week. £350 was his response. I could tell by then that there was fuck all chance of any further negotiation. I handed over £150 to keep me earning over the weekend (this was a Friday) and drive away without Billy even asking to see my hack badge! 

So how did the 1986 Metrocab compare to my 1999 example I hear (about two) of you ask? Well, this was a five seater as opposed to my six seater and from the start I could tell that they were chalk and cheese. A quirk of the early Metrocabs is the interior layout. A Fairway, and indeed my current 2013 E7 hack, have partitions that zig zag inside the cab to both allow more interior room for the driver and a wheelchair user. The early Metrocab takes this to the nth degree, the driver of an early Metrocab is expected to look through no less that three layers of perspex and glass when looking through his left window. As you can imagine this is a nightmare when driving in the dark. Another problem with this cab was the manual gearbox. Now, I've owned a Lancia Beta Coupe and reguarly used to drive a 1982 Alfa Guilietta owned by a friend but this gearbox was something else! Fucked didn't even begin to describe how bad it was! Night shifts were made worse by nearly every instrument and dash light failing to illuminate meaning that driving along a speed camera infested road a very squeaky arse experience. Being a 1986 cab it predated the requirement to be fitted with an intercom. This coupled with being a rattly GRP shed equipped with a very vocal Ford 2.5Di engine meant that there was fuck all chance of any driver to passenger conversation whilst on the move. To it's credit it was a hell of a lot faster and more economical than my 1999 version. 

[LightBulbFun]

19 minutes ago, warren t claim said:

X918UMB where are you now? Probably recycled into a fridge door. 

3 total keepers, 2nd keeper acquired it on the 18th of the 9th 2003, last one acquired it on the 22nd of 6th 2012, last V5 10th July 2012, MOT Ran out on the 19 September 2013, its showing as SORN, might just be one of DVLA's glitched fake SORN's, but there is no scrapped/CoD marker against it for what thats worth

 

very much enjoying the write ups/stories still  (is this the same TX1 you chased the Metro in? LOL)

id love to own an FX4 of any type (1958-1997) someday, but im not sure Id know where to start, I fear I have missed the boat on them sadly, and I dont think I have the ability/capacity to take on any of the remaining ones out there, I imagine they are all probably fairly involved projects by this point

 

it is very cool to see Billy still has a collection of them still  

[warren t claim]

2 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

 

 

very much enjoying the write ups/stories still  (is this the same TX1 you chased the Metro in? LOL)

 

Yes it was the same cab I chased the Metro in. 

X918UMB was what cabbies refer to as a "good cab". The wildly varying build quality that LTI vehicles had us drivers rating seemingly identical cabs as either good, average or shit. That's not to say that it wasn't lacking any issues. It used to suffer from blowing a headlamp bulb at least once a week and although the clutch was reasonably light compared to other ~TX1s I worked, the gearchange was poor at best.

[warren t claim]

Sorry for hijacking this thread, I'll fuck off elsewhere if you want. I'm only contributing because I've got an association with the hackney and private hire trade that stretches back over twenty years.

[High Jetter]

Interesting, that. When I started on private hire in 1987 the Eastbourne hackney plates were worth* at least £25k. That perceived value was totally wiped out when they stopped limiting the number of plates. The they allowed more PH so the trade was on it's arse well before covid hit. Many drivers went off to do other things so trying to get a car now can be a right pain - and then you're lucky if they have a clue about where they're going or how to drive.

[mk2_craig]

19 hours ago, warren t claim said:

I'll fuck off elsewhere if you want

Please don't - its fascinating insight. I'm always amazed at the different arrangements across the country, when at the end of the day its all about moving people from one place to another.

[warren t claim]

Lets have a shufty at the present day value of Liverpool plated cabs. 

Although the plate value has plummeted from the pre Uber heyday when they'd change hands for £30,000 they have risen from a couple of years ago when you could snap one up from a desperate driver during the pandemic for £5k.

Here's a cab identical to mine other than mine has alloys. 

https://www.gumtree.com/p/taxi-services/long-collar-e7-taxi-liverpool/1454819354

£320 a week is a lot of money to rent a cab without insurance. Even taking into account the free access to the Alpha system, that's about £100 a week more than I could rent mine out for.

So is buying a Liverpool hack plate a good investment? Let's have a look at their current value.

https://www.gumtree.com/p/other-vehicles/liverpool-taxi-plate-for-sale-/1454681231

£12,000.

https://www.inyourarea.co.uk/marketplace/615bd19d3afb07001220c202

 

I'm assuming that the £260 a week price advertised includes insurance as he's charging £10 a week excess as well.

[warren t claim]

I may delete this and other posts on this thread later as I really don't want to piss the OP off with tangent comments about the Merseyside cab trade which is at best, a somewhat niche interest.

Here we have something called Liverpool City Region. This comprises of Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, St Helens and Wirral Councils. Out of all of these licencing authorities, only Liverpool still restricts the number of hackney plates causing them to have a perceived value. This is preventing us from having a uniform licencing policy for hacks and PH in Merseyside. There's so many conflicting requirements on vehicles that it'd be difficult for them all to reach an agreement. For example, Halton and Sefton will plate a Mondeo as a hackney but Sefton insist that all hacks without a separate chassis are age limited to ten years old. Wirral has banned tinted glass from all of its PH cars and has a strict ten year age limit for PH cars unlike Liverpool and Sefton.

Another thing to consider is the knowledge test. Sefton is the only LCR council to abolish the knowledge test for new PH applicants. Until a few years ago Sefton had a pretty strict and comprehensive knowledge test but saw the chance to become the badge of choice for any Uber hopeful therefore increacing the council's coffers. If you imagine the LCR area as something like London then if there was a combined all areas knowledge test then it'd be comparable to the "London Knowledge" as geographically it's a similar size. As it stands now, every LCR badged driver is the equivalent of a TFL "Yellow Badge" holder licenced to a particular suburb, there's no such thing as an all Merseyside badge or plate.

15 years ago there were vague mutterings about Liverpool delimiting its hackney numbers after the 2008 Capitol Of Culture year had finished but the Liverpool hack plate owners had a good solicitor and a council that was known to be receptive to brown envelope backhanders. Local councils in the LCR area have even reached the point where they are pitching drivers from other LCR councils to swap badges for their patch! At the 2019 Liverpool Taxi Exhibition the Liverpool City Taxi Police Enforcement Team saw me looking at the then new Mondeo Hybrid estate fitted with rear privacy glass. Spotting that I'm Wirral badged they strolled over to tell me that factory privacy glass is allowed by LCC and would I like a leaflet explaining on how to swap my badge over. 

 

 

[LightBulbFun]

25 minutes ago, warren t claim said:

I may delete this and other posts on this thread later as I really don't want to piss the OP off with tangent comments about the Merseyside cab trade which is at best, a somewhat niche interest.

Here we have something called Liverpool City Region. This comprises of Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, St Helens and Wirral Councils. Out of all of these licencing authorities, only Liverpool still restricts the number of hackney plates causing them to have a perceived value. This is preventing us from having a uniform licencing policy for hacks and PH in Merseyside. There's so many conflicting requirements on vehicles that it'd be difficult for them all to reach an agreement. For example, Halton and Sefton will plate a Mondeo as a hackney but Sefton insist that all hacks without a separate chassis are age limited to ten years old. Wirral has banned tinted glass from all of its PH cars and has a strict ten year age limit for PH cars unlike Liverpool and Sefton.

Another thing to consider is the knowledge test. Sefton is the only LCR council to abolish the knowledge test for new PH applicants. Until a few years ago Sefton had a pretty strict and comprehensive knowledge test but saw the chance to become the badge of choice for any Uber hopeful therefore increacing the council's coffers. If you imagine the LCR area as something like London then if there was a combined all areas knowledge test then it'd be comparable to the "London Knowledge" as geographically it's a similar size. As it stands now, every LCR badged driver is the equivalent of a TFL "Yellow Badge" holder licenced to a particular suburb, there's no such thing as an all Merseyside badge or plate.

15 years ago there were vague mutterings about Liverpool delimiting its hackney numbers after the 2008 Capitol Of Culture year had finished but the Liverpool hack plate owners had a good solicitor and a council that was known to be receptive to brown envelope backhanders. Local councils in the LCR area have even reached the point where they are pitching drivers from other LCR councils to swap badges for their patch! At the 2019 Liverpool Taxi Exhibition the Liverpool City Taxi Police Enforcement Team saw me looking at the then new Mondeo Hybrid estate fitted with rear privacy glass. Spotting that I'm Wirral badged they strolled over to tell me that factory privacy glass is allowed by LCC and would I like a leaflet explaining on how to swap my badge over. 

 

 

perhaps it would be worth checking with @sierraman if he minds first or not  i dont think the rest of us does! 

the bit about the age limit on hacks without a separate chassis is interesting, do vehicles with a separate chassis have a different age limit, or are they completely un-restricted?

could someone plate up a LWB Series 1/2/3 Land Rover or something daft like that? or would other requirements like wheel-chair accessibility put paid to that silly idea?

 

 

on the subject of oldest working Taxis this does remind me that I think there still technically some horse drawn carriage hackney well err Carriages out there, mostly just for touristy/show reasons of course these days but i think legally speaking they are taxis and do carry the required plate on the back etc

well I say "oldest" I guess I should say oldest mode of transport? since i have no idea how old the actual carriage bit is, and I doubt the horses are THAT old LOL

[warren t claim]

2 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

perhaps it would be worth checking with @sierraman if he minds first or not  i dont think the rest of us does! 

the bit about the age limit on hacks without a separate chassis is interesting, do vehicles with a separate chassis have a different age limit, or are they completely un-restricted?

could someone plate up a LWB Series 1/2/3 Land Rover or something daft like that? or would other requirements like wheel-chair accessibility put paid to that silly idea?

 

 

on the subject of oldest working Taxis this does remind me that I think there still technically some horse drawn carriage hackney well err Carriages out there, mostly just for touristy/show reasons of course these days but i think legally speaking they are taxis and do carry the required plate on the back etc

The LTI TX cabs have a separate chassis which is why they were made exempt from the age limit as Sefton needed wheelchair friendly cabs to cover their special school runs. A quirk of their regs means that if you'd managed to convert an American Ford Crown Vic to RHD it could be plated as a cab forever as it's got a body on frame construction.

[Dave_Q]

When I was at uni in Bradford there were loads of Rossendale badged hackney* Avensis' etc plying their trade of an evening.

I understand that the Rossendale badge manoeuvre is because Bradford and some other places are still limited on hacks, and because Rossendale are happy to hand out more hack plates than the total number of humans & sheep in the district as an earner.

Is there an equivalent out of area "plate of convenience" you get over your side? And if you are hackney plated, can you ply for trade anywhere or only in the district that gave you your plate?

[warren t claim]

Here's a post where I'll have to tread carefully to avoid censorship.

Almost all of the UK hack and PH licencing 

1 minute ago, Dave_Q said:

When I was at uni in Bradford there were loads of Rossendale badged hackney* Avensis' etc plying their trade of an evening.

I understand that the Rossendale badge manoeuvre is because Bradford and some other places are still limited on hacks, and because Rossendale are happy to hand out more hack plates than the total number of humans & sheep in the district as an earner.

Is there an equivalent out of area "plate of convenience" you get over your side? And if you are hackney plated, can you ply for trade anywhere or only in the district that gave you your plate?

Rossendale used to be the equivalent "flag of convenience" to Liberian registered cargo ships.

[warren t claim]

Here's a surprisingly sensitive subject. The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. This devolves hack and PH regs to every specific local authority in the UK bar one. London. As a dual hack and PH badge holder I'm going to my best to be impartial here. 

Both green and yellow badged hack drivers in London used to have a powerful voice. This meant that through lobbying they made sure that The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 didn't apply in London. The London black cab drivers didn't want PH, or as they call them, Minicabs licenced and regulated in London. As shit as it sounds, they saw every woman raped in the back of a Sierra by an illegal immigrant from Somalia as great publicity for using a black cab. Minicabs being unlicenced also meant that London hacks had the stranglehold on most of the lucrative corporate accounts in the City as well. 

The thing is, London hack drivers were more than happy to give the work they didn't want to the minicab trade. You must have heard the London cabbie saying of "South of the water? This time of night? You're having a laugh ain't ya?" 

This all changed with the arrival of the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998 which took a few years for TFL to get their head around. Until about 2001 you could turn up at the London minicab office of your choice in any Mk3 Cavalier that you'd just bought from an auction and ask for a job. No badge, police background check or vehicle licence required. Just turn up, pay your first weeks radio rental and away you go. No topographical knowledge needed. TFL first started dragging their licencing policy out of the 1970s by first requiring minicab drivers to be badged and pass a very simple topographical knowledge test proving that they could read an A To Z. A couple of years later they started to licence the minicab fleet. Rather than go along the lines of almost every other licencing authority and insist on minicabs being fitted with a rear plate and magnetic door signs, TFL bowed down to the black cab lobby and insisted that a minicab can only be distinguished by a sticker in the rear window. After TFL set this regulation the hack drivers put a banner out in the rank on Kings Cross station saying WE WIN. NO EXTERNAL SIGNAGE FOR MINICABS.

[High Jetter]

OT, but in L'pool a few years back the PH firm with an app were ace. Slippery air bnb bathroom floor not so much so, wife got a replacement hip in the end.

[warren t claim]

Why are so many local authorities in the UK allowing hacks to be plated without an age limit as opposed to PH cars that are both better built and more rust resistant I (don't) hear you say?

Well it comes down to basic economics. It's much cheaper to outsource the transport of wheelchair users to the local hackney fleet than to run its own fleet of specially adapted vehicles complete with a driver who'll require wages, sick and holiday pay along with a gold standard council pension. You may, as an able bodied person think that having a hack fleet that's wheelchair friendly is a good thing. Sadly, for many elderly and disabled members of the public this is far from the truth. For many elderly people having to step up into a hack is something that they find difficult to do. Many times I've had to pull out the drawbridge wheelchair ramp so they can get in and out. Only today I had an elderly gent have to slide off the back seat and onto the floor so he could exit my cab with his bad leg!

[Spurious]

I've seen more than a few Sefton and Rossendale cabs in Oldham/Mossley way in GM. 

Figured their councils must be a soft touch as it's effing miles away from either of them in Manchester.