Highway Heavy Metal - Worlds Trucks At Work

There are vehicles designed to transport the family, vehicles intended to impress the neighbours, and vehicles whose sole purpose is to move fifty tons of industrial equipment across a continent without becoming hopelessly entangled in the scenery. The last category is where the real excitement begins, particularly if your idea of an enjoyable afternoon involves enormous diesel engines, eighteen wheels and a reversing manoeuvre requiring the assistance of three men and a small committee.

In Highway Heavy Metal – World’s Trucks at Work (1986), Arthur Ingram and Phippard Martin celebrate the mighty machines that keep the world’s industries moving. Published by Blandford Press, this illustrated tribute to commercial road transport explores the extraordinary variety of trucks employed in hauling everything from everyday freight to enormous loads that really ought to have been transported by railway, ship or possibly several elephants.

The book captures an era when trucks were unapologetically mechanical monsters, built to work hard, travel enormous distances and occasionally produce enough exhaust smoke to obscure a reasonably sized village. From powerful long-distance highway hauliers to specialist industrial transporters, these magnificent machines demonstrate that moving heavy objects is a considerably more complicated business than simply attaching a trailer and hoping for the best.

Behind every impressive truck lies a remarkable combination of engineering, practical ingenuity and the determination of drivers who spend their working lives negotiating mountain passes, crowded cities, remote highways and service stations serving food of uncertain historical provenance. While the rest of us complain about the difficulty of parking a family hatchback, professional truck drivers routinely manoeuvre enormous articulated vehicles into spaces that appear to have been designed for a wheelbarrow.

Ingram and Martin offer an appreciation of the machines and the work they perform, reflecting a period when the commercial vehicle industry was developing increasingly powerful engines, sophisticated transmissions and specialised equipment to meet the demands of modern transport. It was a world of serious machinery, serious mileage and fuel consumption figures best discussed in private.

There is also something wonderfully reassuring about the sheer physical presence of these vehicles. Unlike the modern tendency to disguise engineering beneath smooth plastic surfaces, the great trucks of the twentieth century looked exactly like what they were: enormous mechanical devices built to earn their living.

Condition: Very Good. This is a previously owned copy dating from 1986, showing only modest signs of age and handling. It has survived four decades without requiring a replacement gearbox, a new set of tyres or an expensive inspection by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, which makes it considerably less troublesome to own than the machinery pictured within.

Published by Blandford Press in 1986. ISBN: 9780713716146.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where we appreciate industrial machinery in all its magnificent excess, particularly when it can be delivered through the letterbox rather than requiring a police escort and an abnormal-load notification.

An excellent addition to any collection of commercial vehicle literature, transport history or heavy engineering. Particularly recommended for truck enthusiasts, professional drivers and anyone who believes that the finest vehicles are not measured by their acceleration from 0 to 60 mph, but by how many tons they can haul uphill without bursting into flames.

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