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Memory of the month the way things were (Part Four)

One day in around 1967 Horace White came to see me, at the time I was running a IH 175c track shovel an excellent machine, he asked me how would I fancy going on a Cat D9G, this of course would be quite a step up from my current machine into the big league so to speak, so I jumped at the chance with a little trepidation as I hadn’t even seen one because they tended to work away from home most of the time.

The machine was to work on the new gas works which had previously been a quarry and there was a lot of rock to move, when I arrived at the site and the machine was already there.  As it was an old machine with a donkey engine start Les White was going to show me the ropes and although not complicated a certain procedure had to be followed and even now after all these years I can easily remember it, anyway I soon picked it up and cracked on.

Two Cat 955s were loading the material away to the cement works which were about a half a mile away so a quick turnaround, a drop ball was breaking up the big rocks one weighed about a hundred tons and took him three days to break up.  As the weeks passed the rock was getting much harder to rip until I could do no more, this infuriated the site foreman who had run a D9  in the past and tended to give us a bit stick anyway, he insisted I should be able to shift it.  He then rang up Whites and said he wanted a more experienced operator to run the machine, of course I was a bit down hearted about this as it felt like failure.  They sent down a chap who had been running one for years whom the foreman knew and he took one look at it and said you’ll never rip that and I had done well to have got as far as I had, I was much relieved and a drilling rig was brought in to crack it up a bit but only a little explosive could used due to the sensitive nature of the construction already in place.

A couple of weeks later when the shift ended we noticed the foreman was still on site in the main office, so we thought perhaps it was time we sent him a little message, we quickly lifted his van up on blocks so all the wheels were off the ground and went home. Next day we wondered what sort of reaction we would get, but it was OK as he did see the funny side of it.

One day a strange looking piece of kit turned up on site, this was the first skip lorry ever seen by anyone on site and was on demonstration, well for the particular job we were doing it was a complete waste of time as by the time it dropped the skip and the 955 loaded it and he picked it up again a tipper would be long gone, however we could see it could be useful.  As we were having our lunch break we heard there had been an accident at the tip so we nipped over there, the lorries had been tipping over the edge of a quarry face about a hundred foot high and fortunately the material had reached the top and you all know the steep angle of the slope.

Photo: Archive shot courtesy of Steve Rush, not the actual event described in the post. 

The skip lorry had gone to tip its load over the edge and the skip had missed the hooks at back end and swung out like a pendulum causing the lorry to go straight over backwards, the skip dug into the material and stopped, the lorry was resting on the arms pointing well over upright in the air and  the skip controls were inside the cab so the driver had a hell of a shock. 

He managed to get out but unsurprisingly forgot to stop the engine which was key start/stop and the cab was so high and hanging over we couldn’t get up there to stop it, we considered smashing the battery terminals with a scaffold pipe but weren’t sure if that would actually stop the engine, we had to leave then so we presumed it ran until it seized up a shame for a brand new vehicle. 

Following that incident the controls were sited outside the vehicle. There will be a second instalment from this site next month. The Co-operator