Star Of The East

Although T&D has featured the company before, the Scania four-wheelers of the Crowsons Potatoes fleet still look as good as the day they were delivered

A lot happened in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down, it was the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Hillsborough disaster, Ted Bundy became somewhat hot under the collar in Florida’s electric chair, Salman Rushdie got into a bit of bother for the Satanic Verses, proposals were voiced for a World Wide Web, and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed and executed. And, at the end of the year, G210 WJF was ready to go on the road, having been formally registered on 1 January 1990.

Now 27 years have passed, the internet is part and parcel of our everyday lives. Rushdie can breathe a little easier, the Hillsborough victims have (finally) got justice, Germany is a single nation and South Africa is not so divided either. There’s little outlook for Ted Bundy and Nicolae Ceausescu, but that was of their making… but G210 WJF is still hard at work!

It’s a G, not a P

The Scania G93 (not a P93 as I have to admit I thought it was) is owned and operated by Leicester-based Crowsons Potatoes. The truck has been impeccably maintained and looked after, despite being worked pretty hard. It’s proof if it were ever needed that if you look after a truck, and it’s well built in the first place, then it should last for a very long time.

Working out of the company’s Portishead Road base, it is one of three similar small Scanias – the other two are P93s – that collect potatoes from farms around the country, which are then sold to chip shops within a 30-mile radius of Leicester. Crowsons has been dealing in spuds since 1957.