The Classic Machinery Network

It was still Shellabear Price in the mid 60s. I worked alongside the company in Belgium (Verviers) in 1964. Peter Price ran the firm at that time. They were basically muckshifters with maybe 10 TS24 motor scrapers together with the usual backup dozers. they generally had excellent plant operators. U...

Moving scrapers from site to site by road was the "way it was done" in the 60s and early 70s. Prior to 1963 the TS24 was probably the biggest scraper in use, having an air activated power shift and brakes one had to be careful not to exhaust the air supply otherwise you were stuck in gear....

Not quite of the same magnitude as the Indus however, I worked on the W A C Bennett dam in British Columbia (800 miles north of Vancouver) in 1966 / 1967. We ran 30 D9Gs on a 3 x 8 hour shift system 7 days a week. Total volume of fill was 100 million tons over a 5 year period. This was a massively i...

Interesting to read about the old timers of the 60s & 70s with Dick Hampton. I worked for Dick briefly in '63 and again in '71. Belbrougton/Clent on TS14s under Ashton Reest (Gordon Elson on a 68a) and then to the M1 under Peter the German. Needless to say we parted company after refusing to man...

Looking at the condition of the TS24s in the photo's they could well be of the E25 job in Verviers, Belgium. There was also a couple of C6 dozers about. This was a double 12 hour shift operation except, the Belgians (rightly so) did not allow Sunday working so SP worked up to midnight Saturday then ...

One of the big muck shifters in the 60s was Shellabear Price. I have yet to see any comment whatsoever on this company or, indeed, from anyone who worked for them. They ran a substantial fleet of TS24s and CAT dozers. They did a lot of power station work and, of course the usual motorway work in tha...

Re Dowsett, very big in the opencast coal business in the 50s and early 60s, mostly in Co Durham and Northumberland. They had a substantial presence on the first section of the M1 with Laing, in the early 60s they worked on the original Wetherby By-pass (1963) and various other A1 improvement scheme...

I worked on the M40 (known then as High Wycombe By-pass) in 1964. We had 3 No Cat 631Bs, which were probably the first in the UK, also 4 No Cat DW21s. This was the Stokenchurch to Marlow Road section. Site agent Peter Baldwin. Worked again on this section in 1965 after a spell in West Africa. This t...