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English Plant Man in Canada (Part Two)

As mentioned in part one, Tom set up his own business March Equipment Services Inc, after a couple of years working for various companies. Tom is fortunate enough to have a great customer who he describes as being out of the old school of muckshifters, something of a dying breed in all honesty these days.

This summer Tom is going to be looking after a fleet of Cat 627G’s and 627F motor scrapers, carrying out all the routine servicing and maintenance work for them on a road building project in rural Saskatchewan.

Talking about the machines Tom said, “I know there are not too many companies making a living from these older scrapers in the UK anymore and I think it’s cool that they still carry some popularity here among the road building community”.

Of course just recently we have seen small surge in scraper deployment once more in the UK, most notably from Essex based John Garner’s VA Services business and Lionel Whitnell, has added two to his fleet, not forgetting the Sirius Group who are running the Volvo ADT’s towing the K-Tec scrapers, with big jobs coming down the line like HS2 one can imagine there will be demand for more.

Anyway, back to Canada, Tom has already been busy on this new job, the John Deere 750K dozer had suffered a track link failure so he had to press in a new link. Like many a site mechanic Tom was in at 5.30am to get the job done so the machine would be up and running for the start of the shift, Tom said, “It was a cracking morning with glorious sky, morning checks were done with the scrapers all lined up ready for the off! They didn’t hang about long either on the topsoil strip, as rain was predicted later that day”.

We thank Tom for his photos and insight into what he is doing over in Canada, hopefully he will share more of his adventures with us here on the Digger Man Blog in due course.