WHEN ‘SAL’ CAME NORTH

Tuesday 8th March 1983 was a good day – well for me anyway. You might have used the expression ‘Red Letter Day’ or perhaps referred to being so happy that you ‘Felt like a dog with two tails.’ Or perhaps you felt so fortunate about something you may have described the feeling as ‘Like all your birthdays had come at once.’ I hope you catch my drift. So if you amalgamate all those feelings of joy into one then you may get part way as to how I felt on that day. Because I was at long last watching (and photographing) something I had long yearned to see and which I thought – because of its rarity – I would never ever encounter in the metal.

In fairness, if you coldly analysed what I was looking at then you might wonder about my sanity. The vehicle in question was certainly looking a mite scruffy as it had obviously been wandering round a building site or two and a good wash might have helped. And its paint job didn’t seem quite right. Yes, it had all the correct details of local North East haulier GCS Johnson but the base colour scheme was red and white – not the normal stunning dark blue they normally used. And the illuminated headboard on top of the cab had ‘Johnson Haulage’ written there – that was strange as I’d never seen anything like that before on any of their other motors. Even the load in question wasn’t that pulsating – just a routine sort of crawler machine being moved around the side streets of Redcar on the coast at Teesside. The rear-steer tandem axle low loading semi-trailer looked