REBUILDING POST WAR SWANSEA TOWN
WITH RUSTON BUCYRUS DIGGERS
If you like the sound of machinery or even just like talking machinery BUILDING THE IRON will give you a tonic!! There are plenty of pinions, bevel gears, clutches and drumshafts with machinery deck side frames and control levers for good measure. You can actually feel the oil and grease on your hands so sling your hook this way and wrap it around memories of those boyhood diggery days. You will be in good company.
With its continental style box like cab the most recognisable and easily identified digger to hypnotize 1950s building site watchers must surely have been the Ruston Bucyrus 10-RB. Mostly it seemed to me at the time just a schoolboy becoming aware of such things, for digging up and grading roads with what was called a skimmer scoop. As illustrated in the picture above it was a boxy sort of bucket with teeth mounted on wheels and pulled along the digging arm by a cable when set horizontal with the road. Lifted clear on reaching the end of its travel the whole machine then swung around to drop the rubble into a waiting lorry. This was the most interesting part because to discharge the contents, the driver pulled a rope from up inside the cab, and the floor of the box swung open. We, the spectators, watched this action time and time again totally mesmerized by the rope pulleys constantly turning first one way and then the other as the digging arm was lifted up and down and the box floor flipped open. Re-closing it was a dramatic event on its own, accomplished with a final flourish as the bucket was allowed to run free a short distance down the lifted digging arm before sudden brake application caused the floor to swing up into the keep latch and snap shut with a satisfying little clunk. For digging foundations and utility trenches the 10-RB' converted to a drag shovel, also known as a backactor, another crowd pleaser although not as exciting and slower in operation. Audiences watched as trenches grew deeper and longer with every bite, the bucket eating its fill and the drag and hoist ropes seeming to have a tug of war before finally lifting out of the trench to discharge spoil into a waiting lorry.
So follow me around a few projects of the time, we'll have a chat with some of the drivers and then off to Swansea High Street Railway Station for my steam train journey to Lincoln and the Cathedral high machine and erecting shops of Ruston Bucyrus at their Beevor Street factory. It's the 1960's; Rock & Roll, Beatle mania and all that. We'll see a lot of action as they put things together, maybe have a few laughs on the way as we nip down to London for a weekend and pop into some guitar shops and the famous 2'Is Coffee bar in Wardour Street. This is both a tribute to those those times, the days of our youth and a salute to the industry of which we were a part along with the people I was lucky enough to work with. So bring some spanners and I'll introduce you to a few of them along the way.
TEL: 029 20867364 MOB: 07944 692695
