A trucking good Easter

For most people, Easter Sunday is a time of rest and relaxation. Not for me though as I headed to Jacks Hill Cafe near Towcester for their annual Vintage Truck Gathering. Having never been before, I was expecting a small event featuring a couple of dozen vehicles, but was amazed to discover around a hundred trucks in attendance, covering all eras from pre-war to the early 21st century, along with a lot of motorbikes and a handful of classic cars and light commercials. The event started at 9am and I arrived around 11 to find cars parked all along the verges and the place teeming with people and vehicles.

Trucks everywhere as a Ford Transcontinental squeezes out

This was the sixth time this event had been held as it started as a small gathering in 2012 and has got bigger and better ever since. Every inch of space around the cafe was occupied, with trucks parked two or three deep in places, and getting out often involved a lot of shunting and precision driving. Jacks Hill is a working truckstop and transport cafe and a number of foreign-registered trucks had parked up overnight, so one wonders what their drivers thought on waking up to find the site full of classics as if they had travelled back in time!

Who needs polish anyway? This looks like it came straight from a hard day's work

The majority of exhibits were fairly local, but some had travelled long distances including ERFs from Tamworth and Somerset. Just about all the well-known British and European marques were represented, with a good mix and no single type dominating the event as with the Scanias and Volvos at Gaydon. Many were tractor units, some with trailers, but there were plenty of rigids with a variety of bodywork, including dropsides, flatbeds, boxes, tankers, tippers and recovery vehicles.

A real-life version of the Matchbox toy I had when I was young

Local recovery firm CMG were out in force with four vehicles from their large fleet, a 4x4 Iveco incident support unit, one of the modern Volvo FHs, the famous Kenworth and a massive ex Army 6x6 Foden. The latter was one of three such vehicles present, making them the most numerous type. Another Foden that caught my eye among the highly-polished show trucks was a black S10 tractor unit that hadn't even been washed and looked like a proper hard-working vehicle covered in mud.

CMG's big beast, one of three ex Army Fodens in attendance

One of my highlights wasn't actually a truck, but a 1952 Bedford KZ school bus imported from New Zealand. The KZ chassis was mainly used as a basis for ambulances and bus versions are rare; this one had spent most of its life with a college in Christchurch before coming to the UK fairly recently. It was a pleasant surprise to see LDL 345, the Commer QX formerly owned by the now-defunct Holtons of Old Stratford and still in Holtons livery, as I have the Vanguards model of this very vehicle but had not seen it in the flesh before.

All the way from Christchurch, New Zealand

The most fascinating lorry present was a 1958 Scammell Junior Constructor with a massive towbar and measuring equipment on the front and concrete ballast blocks on the back. This unique vehicle had been delivered new to the Motor Industry Research Association as a mobile testbed and spent the next 55 years there, hidden from view and covering hardly any miles, before being rescued for preservation. It was used for assessing the towing capacity of other lorries in a rather ingenious way - it carried a huge dynamometer that was driven by the wheels so as the Scammell was towed it provided more and more resistance to the towing vehicle until it could no longer pull it. Another odd feature is the cab being offset to the right so the driver could see more clearly past the towing vehicle.

Incredibly this didn't appear in public until 2012!

  

Even though this wasn't a car show, the Maxi still attracted a huge amount of attention and I noticed a lot of people looking at it and taking photos. At one point it found itself in exotic company when a Ferrari parked alongside, but the Maxi is probably the rarer of those two cars. The Ferrari later disappeared to be replaced by something more down-to-earth but also now a rarity, a 21-year old Mitsubishi Carisma, and the owner of the latter took a photo of it alongside the Maxi. It wasn't alone as other classics included a Rover SD1, Morris Minor, Triumph TR4 and a lovely old Fintail Mercedes.

Maxi meets a more common car

There were no fixed hours for the event so exhibitors and visitors came and went as they pleased throughout the morning and what was on display changed regularly. By lunchtime it was pretty much over and the trucks started leaving in large numbers, but I hung around to watch them go as gaps opened up and allowed better photos of some of those that had been hemmed in earlier on. All in all it was a very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours on a sunny Sunday morning, and I was surprised by the number and variety of trucks that paid a visit so I would certainly recommend this event to truck fans.

I have fond memories of Holtons so it was great to see this