That spelling looks wrong but I can’t find an alternative that looks right…
We were on our way back from Soph’s parents last night; the route from their part of rural Worcestershire to our bit of rural Oxfordshire is single carriageway ‘A’ road all the way. Not one ‘A’ road, we have to switch between a bunch of them, but the quality of road remains the same all the way.
It was dark, about 2.5c and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads.
At one point as we were coming across the top end of the Cotswolds we caught up with a lorry which was following a car.
The lorry was a six-axled articulated lorry and it, like us, was doing 60mph. Which is illegal; the national speed limit for Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) on a road of that specification is 56mph.
But the lorry driver wasn’t having any of that legal nonsense.
He pulled right up behind the car and put his headlights on full beam. And left them on full beam.
I felt sorry for the car driver, it must have felt as if he was getting lasered to death; lorry headlights being set at a punishingly blinding height for car drivers even when dipped.
But this lorry-driving maniac had only one thought; he had to get to wherever he was going and he had to get there quicker than the 60mph that he was being held back to – by the car in front.
I dropped back a couple of car lengths and flipped my headlights up to full beam and left them there until the lorry driver eventually dropped his back to dip.
What a total shite this lorry driver was.
Anyway, the car turned off, probably to find a hospital to have his retina-burn treated, and the lorry sped away from us in a burst of speed that was completely inappropriate for a country road.
The lorry registration number was X111 EDC. We think the haulage company was ‘Spicer’s’.
If anyone can throw any light on this company I’d appreciate it; this was dangerous driving at its worst and should be reported.
Blue Scania? Interesting – X-reg plate but the vehicle it’s attached to was first registered only 3 years ago.
There’s a wholesale office products company by that name, but it’s in Cambridge, so it would be a bit off its patch and I’d expect a company like that to contract out its deliveries anyway.
I know they are supposed to be “the knights of the road; the lifeblood that travels up and down the country’s arteries keeping our economy alive…” or some such nonsense (although to a degree, it’s obviously true), but some of them do drive like complete arses, sometimes.
Spicers are a large nationwide paper business, they have lorries all over the country.
I know that road well and those speeds are inappropriate for that vehicle.
I don’t want to do the Old Bill thing, I just want to drop the company an email and let them know they’ve got a loony on the payroll. And that course of action sounds weird but I can’t help it.
Caroline, as always you display breathtaking qualities; I didn’t mention the make or the colour of the lorry! 🙂
*grin* Good trick isn’t it?? You put the numberplate into something like mycarcheck.com to get the make and model of the vehicle and then go to the DVLA online tax disc renewal site – http://www.taxdisc.direct.gov.uk/ – click on Vehicle Enquiry and plug in the info. It’ll tell you when the tax is due and how much it’ll be as well.
Ring the company and tell them. The mad bastard is going to kill someone doing that kind of thing. We had a similar incident on the A66 to Penrith only after realising that trying to blind me and trying to nudge my car into going faster wasn’t going to work so the mad fucktard overtook me at about 80mph on a blind bend.
There is no 56mph speed limit for lorries – that is just a limiter that is put on many lorries to stop them exceeding national speed limits.
If it was a single carriageway road then depending on whether the lorry was over or under 7.5t means the limit should have been either 40mph or 50mph – which as you drive a lorry you should know!
http://www.smartdriving.co.uk/Driving/DefensiveDriving/Speed/UK_Speed_limits.html
Mea culpa on the info Mia. You are correct. The speed the lorry should have been doing was, of course, 40mph. This compounds the driver’s behaviour.
the company is spiers and hartwell they are based in evesham, and im guessing the road you were on was the A44? the numberplate if it was X111 EDC refers to Evesham Distribution Centre. The truck would have been a two tone blue scania. i am a truck driver and pride myself on my abilities, its a shame idiots like this let our industry down. the legal limit of the vehicle on that road is 40 mph. hope this helps.