Steering with your bare feet......Originally Posted by grahamw48
At that time I was helping this....
Steering with your bare feet......At that time I was helping this....
Lunch break.
Eating the cheese and pickle sandwiches that I made every single day for virtually my whole time there.
Good thing I like cheese....and pickle.
Part-way into the 2 hour journey to work with 350 China-men on the company ferry...not perhaps how the average Brit would picture Hong Kong....more like the Lake District, but WARM.
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Passing a floating 'dry dock', where big ships get lifted out of the water and given a scrape and a coat of paint.
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Sounds great fun Graham. Have to admit the countryside in Hong Kong is outstanding.
10 years ago when I was training on cargo ships, we loaded quite a lot of plant equipment including JCBs, large computer operated forklifts etc and took them from Belgium to Algeria. Since I was one of the few people onboard with drivers licenses (most of the Filipino seamen onboard didn't even know how to drive, although I'm sure that worked in their favour in Manila!), I was given brief lessons how to drive all of this equipment and was expected to teach the locals on delivery in Algiers.
When we discharged the equipment, I showed a few guys, and tried to explain the equipment in my best french, before they dissapeared off. with one guy completely demolishing a wall and another destroying the port office on his way out... I ended up with my first experience of driving an articulated truck as well, and it took what seemed like forever for me to park the the thing, trying to figure out which way to turn to make the trailer go around. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it :-) Would love to have a play with something that large. The thing about men, is that we are like children with toys, except they become bigger and more expensive the older you get!
Hahaha...can picture the demolition jobs.
Good thing you didn't hand them one of these big boys, similar to some that I also sometimes drove :
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I did that once and ended up being anemic......Lunch break.
Eating the cheese and pickle sandwiches that I made every single day for virtually my whole time there.
Good thing I like cheese....and pickle.
These remind me of the size of the trucks that were used to haul rigs and stuff across the desert....Hahaha...can picture the demolition jobs.
Good thing you didn't hand them one of these big boys, similar to some that I also sometimes drove :
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Could well be.
They'll haul a couple of hundred ton load and more up a pretty steep slope, so should be worth a few camels.
We were mainly driving on sand on the airport, as they'd covered the whole man-made island with a few feet of it.
Deep dry sand really does drag and slow you down though.
The big trucks were used to carry huge chunks of granite (delivered by sea) across to the rock-crushing plant. They ran on their own exclusive roads so as to avoid squashing any of the piddling little 4x4 Nissan Patrols etc.
Obviously this vid is a set-up, but the vehicles are real:
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So no problems driving an HGV then or a London bus......Could well be.
They'll haul a couple of hundred ton load and more up a pretty steep slope, so should be worth a few camels.
We were mainly driving on sand on the airport, as they'd covered the whole man-made island with a few feet of it.
Deep dry sand really does drag and slow you down though.
The big trucks were used to carry huge chunks of granite (delivered by sea) across to the rock-crushing plant. They ran on their own exclusive roads so as to avoid squashing any of the piddling little 4x4 Nissan Patrols etc.
(I just added a video above).So no problems driving an HGV then or a London bus......
Nah...even the Volvo 6x6 in my first pic carries the weight of a fully laden British artic in its bucket...and then tips it over the edge of a mountain.
Those Caterpillars above carry about 250 tons ...so about 425 tons or more all up .
The reason I won't drive an HGV here is the OTHER buggers on the roads.
It was really intresting, but I wish they showed one project fully insted of darting around!
Have set my recorder for the series though and looking forward to watching them.
Graham, if you do not want to write a book, have you put any in a blog? with the photos you have that would be good too?
Mick.
Last edited by mickcant; 28th April 2012 at 21:30. Reason: spelling
Not self-disciplined enough Mick...otherwise I'd have retired on the civil service pension by now...and have nowt to write.
Some great pics in this thread!
I've worked on loads of small construction projects, but I love all the really big stuff and the massive machinery!
The new (then) airport in Hong Kong was supposedly the biggest construction project in the world at that time.
A mere 6,000 working on it when I was there...but later grew to workforce of 20,000 when the terminals were going up !
I believe it and the 15 miles of new roads, suspension bridges and rail connections out to it cost 25 billion USD.
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