She says. . .

Press, 30 November 1978, Page 19

She says. . .

Travelling behind slowmoving, heavily laden trucks is something I hate. I’m always fearful of the truck shedding part of its load in my path, and I hate the stench of the diesel smoke that so often belches blackly from these monsters.

Some of their engine maintenance must be truly dreadful. But any attempt to enforce anti-smoke rules seems to have been virtually abandoned. Not long ago, I found myself trapped behind such a monster — and it was a nasty experience. It happened like this: the truck must have entered the Lyttelton road tunnel a little way ahead of my small car. But it was moving so very slowly with its vast load of containers ■— truly crawling — that I soon caught up quite as close as I was prepared to get. To keep my distance, I had to drop right down through the gears. It was disconcerting to be quite unable to hear the engine when doing this, but the booming roar from the truck was so deafening in the tunnel that it was i ;- terly impossible to hear another sound. The effect of this, the crawling bulk of the truck and the overpowering stench of unburned diesel was frightningly disorientating.

Then, to cap it all, some idiot in an old “tank” came rushing up behind me, and sat within inches of my back bumper flashing his lights. So the law wouldn’t let me pass, the truck wouldn’t let me drive beyond a low-gear crawl, and the bird-brain behind wouldn’t let me drop back. I freely confess I found it a horrible experience. When I related it to a Lyttelton friend, he said he’d had a similar experience and felt every bit as bad — he was on a scooter at the time. Presumably we must suffer these over-loaded under-maintained monsters to use the tunnel. But if we must, I’d strongly suggest to the tunnel authorities that they make sure that crawling “monsters” have a very good “start” on any following traffic. —Barbara Petre