Doug Hamilton’s machine memories (Part Six)

by Nick Drew | Thu 27 Jun 2019

Doug Hamilton’s machine memories (Part Six)

Continuing our series featuring the memoirs and more importantly the photos shared with us by retired plant man Doug Hamilton.

Its been challenging to make any chronological sense out of these photos in terms of dates etc, but I am doing my best to work my way through the extensive collection of emails that Doug sent me. Some of these first shots were as I understand it, still taken on the M3 job where Doug was working for Larry Webb, Doug said, "I always had a camera with me as I travelled around the country, in these last photos from the M3 job show, we had to cross small lakes by building chalk berms then filling in the middle with “bank” material, by doing this it pushed the water out, but it did feel like you were driving on a giant sponge when travelling over it!”

“In this shot my Payhauler is parked right where they filmed some scenes for the film Clockwork Orange, it was where he drove his motorbike through the railings over the River Thames near Abbey Fields park at Chertsey”.

After the M3 job Doug headed back down to the West Country to work on the Kingsteignton bypass in South Devon. As previously mentioned in this series it was a popular for the lads to have their photos taken in front of the kit, in this one they are assembled in front of the legendary Cat D9 which according to Doug was then operated by a guy called Derek Howard.

Another dozer group pose here with two lads in front of a Komatsu 85. I think its safe to say guys back then were a breed of their own, work hard, play hard and all that!

Large loading shovels were once again popular on this job, not only the Hough’s featured earlier in this series, but also the International Payloaders one example of which is seen here loading a Volvo 860 articulated hauler.

There was also a tragic accident on this job site when a dumptruck crashed into a car at one of the crossings. This cutting from the local newspaper back in the day sets the scene, a sad day for all concerned I’m sure. Also interesting to note how newspapers often refer to any earthmoving machinery as a bulldozer, when in this instance. its quite clearly a wheeled loading shovel

More from Doug in the next instalment of this series.

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