by Nick Drew | Fri 14 Jul 2017
Wimpey Plant classics (Blog Post Re-Visited)
Through the power of the internet I have recently managed to get back in contact with one of the old plant managers from my Wimpey Plant (Southampton) days back in the late 70’s early 80’s. Gareth Stokes, who is still involved in the plant game, has kindly shared a couple of archive photos to share here on the Digger Man Blog.
Gareth told us that when he was working out of the Cardiff depot, there used to be a photo album that had photos of past contracts in it, many of the shots inside were used by Wimpey’s own marketing department back in those days. To cut a long story short Gareth rescued this album before it was binned and copied a selection of photos to hang on his office wall, a couple of which are displayed in this post. In this first shot we see a selection of Caterpillar 8R tractors towing what looks like Onions scraper boxes. One of our old work colleagues Bob Railson, of whom I was his fitters mate, described the 8R’s as one of the finest tractors that ever was back in those days, he also notes the difference in track pad sizes, saying narrow for box work, wide for blade work and push loading scrapers, however this rule was often overlooked when there was no pushing work to be done, in his words it was “drop the blade, hang a box on it and f*** the fitters!
The photo quality of these shots isn’t great, but it all adds to the period atmosphere of the good old muckshifting days. In this photo we see a collection of British greats at work on the Grange Farm opencast coal site. In the foreground we see a Ruston no 4 shovel loading coal, as is the Ruston Bucyrus 19RB in face shovel guise to the rear. Higher up on a ledge another 19RB in dragline configuration is removing overburden.
We thank Gareth for sharing these old Wimpey photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog. Wimpey photos have always proven to be a popular topic on my blog, so if you have any collecting dust in the loft, why not send them into me for a future post. Send photos to nickydrew16 at btinternet.com using the usual @ email format.