Vintage Thwaites dumper spotted

by Nick Drew | Mon 05 Jan 2015

Vintage Thwaites dumper spotted

Tim Beere, brother of Nick Beere who was featured with his Cat 432F in issue 129 of Earthmovers has been out and about and spotted this old but well preserved Thwaites dumper.

Tim has a passion for steam trains, unlike Nick who like a majority of us are mad for the diggers. It was during a recent visit to the Highly Station on the Severn Valley Railway that Tim spotted this classic forward tipping dumper from Thwaites and knowing it would be of interest, kindly forwarded the shots onto me.

Official identification of this model has not been possible due to a lack of a serial number but I suspect it could well be an early Tusker or Nimbus model. Thwaites is as synonymous with dumper manufacturing as JCB is for the backhoe loader and to this day the company is solely dedicated to the one product line. The company was founded as far back as 1937 by Basil Thwaites mainly dedicated in those early days to agricultural engineering. In the early 1950’s the company produced its first dumpers and in 1954 all other agricultural products were dropped and the company renamed itself as Thwaites Engineering Ltd. The company has focused on dumpers ever since.

For many of today’s generation driving one of these early models would be a real shock to the system. They had no power steering, were only two wheel drive and rear wheel steer and they had no hydraulics for tipping the skip, you also felt every bump sat on the metal seat, to put it bluntly they were hard work. Especially when one had to fire up the Petter PH1 engine with a starting handle, which if you were unlucky with your timing could easily break your wrist! But of course in those days we knew no different and the machines performed the task to the best of their ability. I also note the name on the rear of the dumper, which does look a bit suspicious to me, possibly somebody having a little wind up I suspect!

Of course today Thwaites are one of the market leaders in dumper manufacture and rightly so, as they have been designing and building them for a very long time. We thank Tim for sharing these photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog.

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