Five Outrageous Lorry Stories You Couldn't Make Up

Whether it is through luck or fate, lorries just seem to keep finding their way to the centre of the most bizarre news stories and urban myths around the internet. Weird and wonderful, strange and terrible, the crazy lorry stories just keep appearing - here are five of the oddest ones out there...

The Lord is Moving to Iowa

Thanks in part to groupage, lorry drivers frequently find themselves transporting full, heavy loads and backloads...but it is doubtful that many drivers have dealt with a load as heavy as the one in this story! The 100 year old Trinity Lutheran Church was moved hundreds of miles to its new home in Manning, Iowa, balanced precariously on the back of an enormous lorry. For the dedicated lorry driver, there truly is no job too big or small! For the curious, there is some truly stunning time lapse photography of the incident on the internet: just Google for "Moving a 100 Year Old Church."

The FedEx Redemption

At the Karlau prison in Austria, a lorry driver experienced a very unusual example of groupage when a convict added himself to the driver's backload, disguised in a parcel. In an inventive escape attempt, several other inmates packaged him up and loaded him on to the back of the lorry. Once the lorry was safely out of the prison gates, Muradif Hasanbegovic (who was serving a seven year sentence for robbery) broke out of the parcel and then out of the truck. The lorry driver told police: "I noticed the tarpaulin had a hole in it just as the prison called me and asked 'Have you noticed anything funny? We are kind of missing a prisoner'."

Covered in Bees!

Everyone knows that lorries sometimes carry dangerous loads, but its rare that they are as unusually dangerous as this! On July 1^st 2008, a lorry carrying 12 million honey bees overturned on a rain slicked road in Canada, spilling its living load out onto the highway. Beekeepers were summoned to try and lure the bees back to their hives, though fortunately the rain kept most of the bees inside the lorry. One over eager reporter was stung whilst attempting to take photographs of the overturned lorry and its unusual cargo, but otherwise no one was injured.

The Chocolate Powered Lorry Goes to Timbuktu

As the race for sustainable fuels continues, there's one very unusual fuel source that should be considered - chocolate. The waste left over from cocoa when it is turned into chocolate can apparently be turned into a form of biodiesel. In order to raise awareness for green fuels, two men drove a chocolate powered lorry from London to Timbuktu with the intention of donating their biodiesel processor and any funds raised to charity.

Sometimes, Cartoons Do Come True

Questions have been raised about the veracity of this story, but sometimes you just want a news story to be real no matter how improbable or unsourced it is. Allegedly, in central China the life of a five year old child was saved when he fell from a fifth floor window, bounced off an awning and then landed in the back of a lorry that was filled with pillows. Awwww...

Lyall Cresswell is the Website manager for The Transport Exchange Group. Their exchange for haulage operators, Haulage Exchange, offers exchanges and groupage organisation for their clients with strict quality control to ensure smooth exchanges.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lyall_Cresswell

Find More : Lorry Transport , Services Transport , Services Moving , lorry driver , enormous lorry , lorry stories

Is Lorry Driving What it Used to Be?

Currently, there is a feeling of real doom and gloom hanging over the logistics industry. You just have to look at the squeeze lorry drivers are facing with rising fuel prices, LEZ charges and congestion fees increasingly cropping up. On top of pretty much everyone feelking a financial pinch, a survey on our site has revealed that over half of our members are working in excess of 60 hours per week - it's no wonder there's a hankering for the 'good old days' of haulage. But was taking a backload then really any better?

In a 2006 article in the Independent, about the low number of young people taking up the profession, Nigel Baxter of RH Freight was keen to point out that things have gotten much better for lorry drivers: "It's a much more sophisticated industry these days, thanks to technology such as satellite navigation...Before the Road Transport Directive came into effect last year [2005], drivers typically worked 65 hours a week, whereas now we're down to 48 with more control over finish times... Health and safety has also been tightened up and the rules on manual handling have changed." He also described the logistics equipment as "far more lightweight and less arduous to use than in the past", suggesting a marked improvement in conditions for lorry drivers. Whether or not Baxter's firm is an exception rather than the rule (as mentioned above, our members are still working long hours), is a harking for the good old days of logistics just hopeless rose-tinted nostalgia, as he suggests?

Well, if you were to take a time machine back to the 1960s, the first thing you'd notice in your considerably less comfortable old lorry cab is the weather - whether you're in winter or in summer. That's right - whether the weather was hot or cold, you were stuck with it. In summer, with the windows rolled down, this wasn't such an issue, but in the freezing winter of 1962, with no cab heater (or an early inefficient model) several layers were far from optional in the old lorries!

Seatbelts only began to appear in certain cars in the 1960s, and they were a real rarity in old lorries - set against a debate over whether they aided safety or restricted escape in the event of being trapped. It's universally accepted that lorries are both more comfortable and safe than they used to be - and this comfort extended to the noise too. Many old lorries in the early 1960s had no noise blocking materials between the lorry driver and the main engine, making them extremely loud! Some cunning old lorry drivers would use blankets to cover the bonnet to dim the noise a bit, which would double up as insulation on some of the trucks with ill-fitting engine covers!

As for in-cab devices, you were mainly left to provide your own entertainment. In car radios were far from standard, and were not particularly widespread until the 70s. You could use a portable radio, but the thick roofs of the old lorry cabs meant that finding and keeping a good aerial signal was almost impossible. Cassette players were just coming into fashion around the 70s - later to be fitted into cars. Portable tape players weren't particularly power efficient and would be unlikely to last a significant part of any old lorry's journey.

haps the most convenient thing that we take for granted these days is the wide availability of the mobile phone. Nowadays, mobiles even have internet access on them, allowing easy communication wherever you are on the road, but in those days you were pretty much on your own in the old lorry. If you needed to urgently get into contact with 'base', you'd be at the mercy of finding a payphone - and you'd probably be left reversing the charges to your company!

Add to this the state of the roads in those days (balanced out by the lower volumes of traffic, but still) and the need to constantly monitor the security of the backload on your truck (the old ropes would shrink and tighten in rain, then dry out in sun, loosening the backload, amongst other hazards) and you begin to realise that modern logistics drivers have never had it so good. It's nice to look back nostalgically on times gone by, but give me my mixtapes and mobile phone any day of the week!

Lyall Cresswell is the Managing Director for the Transport Exchange Group. Haulage Exchange, their freight exchange for the 7.5 tonne and above market, offers an independent environment for its members to swap backloads.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lyall_Cresswell

Find More : Rental Lorry , Lorry Transport , Service Delivery , lorry driver

More Lorry Driver Urban Legends

I've written about lorry driver urban legends before, but they just keep cropping up all over the internet. I'm not sure quite why lorry drivers and their vehicles often seem to be at the centre of these kinds of stories - my theory is that it's the lorry drivers themselves who spread them while running haulage jobs and return loads all over the world! Perhaps it is just that many urban legends take place on the road, and lorry drivers make for convenient and plausible participants. However they spread, these stories are here to stay, and they get wilder and more outlandish with every retelling. Here are five of the best (and one of them is even true!)

Don't Mess With The Lorry Driver

According to this legend, three bikers arrive in a café and see a lorry driver sitting on his own. For some reason they decide it will be fun to pick on him. They drink his coffee, pour pepper over him, and eat most of his food. The lorry driver does nothing, simply eats what is left, pays the bill and leaves. Afterwards, one of the bikers says to the waiter, "He wasn't much of a fighter, was he?" The waiter, who is looking outside, replies "He wasn't much of a driver either; he just backed his lorry straight over three motorcycles parked outside!"

True or False? It wouldn't surprise me if this was true, since lorry drivers are renowned for their non-nonsense nature, but there are no recorded instances of this actually happening. A scene similar to this has appeared several times on film (for example, in Smokey and the Bandit and Every Which Way But Loose) indicating that it probably belongs in the realms of fiction.

Loose Load = Decapitation

Here's a story about a gruesome kind of "return load"! As a motorcyclist is driving behind a lorry, a loose sheet of metal slips from the back of the lorry and decapitates him. The now headless driver, propelled by the momentum of the bike, travels past the lorry driver, who sees the motorcyclist, has a heart attack, and crashes his lorry.

True or False? It was false, but it recently became true! The original story is an urban legend that has been around for decades and has dozens of variations, but gruesomely enough, similar events occurred in 2001. 43 year old Linda Riojas was decapitated by a sheet of metal that apparently fell from a lorry in front and went through her windshield before landing next a Bible in the back seat. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction!

"Wait, is that a-"

A biker is on the road at night (what is it about lorry drivers and bikers in urban legends?) sees two bikers coming down the other side of the road. He decides to show off by riding in between them and turns into the oncoming lane. But at the very last moment, he sees that it isn't two bikes on the road ahead of him, but the headlights of a lorry.

True or False? Definitely false - this one has been kicking around for a long time, told as either a joke or a spooky campfire story. A variation of it even appears in the 1921 film Hard Luck, where Buster Keaton attempts to commit suicide by standing in front of a car (seen only by its headlights) and is instead passed by two bemused motorcyclists.

The Al-Qaida Return Load

Shortly after September 11th, an email did the rounds warning that over thirty rental trucks and lorries had gone missing "taken by Arabic looking men", presumably for a follow up attack.

True or False? Completely false. The three companies mentioned in the original email (Ryder, U-Haul and Verizon) said that none of their lorries had gone missing, and it seems to have been just another email hoax.

Deadly Shipment

A lorry filled with ten tonnes of cyanide is hijacked in Mexico for reasons unknown; terrorism is strongly suspected. The lorry is found days later, but is missing its lethal cargo.

True or False? True! Although it had nothing to do with terrorism (and it is likely that the hijackers weren't even aware of what the lorry was carrying) in February 2002 a lorry was stopped and hijacked by three armed gunmen in Mexico. A few days later, the lorry was found, but with some of the cyanide missing. What happened to it, no one knows...

Lyall Cresswell is the Managing Director for the Transport Exchange Group. Haulage Exchange, their freight exchange for the 7.5 tonne and above market, offers an independent environment for its members to exchange loads and manage their groupage.

Find More : Rental Lorry , Lorry Transport , Service Delivery , lorry driver , rental trucks