Pass Master

Want to learn to drive a truck? At Convoy in the Park you can sample one of the hardest parts of the driving test: the reverse manoeuvre. Here’s how George Barrow got on with his C licence training, courtesy Scania.

- George Barrow

You need to get the London out of you,” said my Scania driving instructor Eddie O’Brien. And therein lay the problem of the next five days of learning to drive an 18-tonne rigid and gaining a Category C licence.

Driving in London is often best summed up with a cartoon-like image of an angry, fist-waving, horn-tooting maniac, but despite being a London driver I wouldn’t class myself as an aggressive one. In fact, I would describe my driving style as the polar opposite of that caricature, usually.

Yet when I arrived for my first day of HGV training and Eddie asked me to score my own driving out of 10 – “Two,” I joked – a look of panic crossed his face. “Really?” he probed.

“Well, I drive a van in London, mostly at rush-hour and only ever in first or second gear. I’m definitely not a bad driver, I just probably couldn’t pass my driving test again.”

His response was unprintable, but as a former native of Millwall, south-east London, and one-time Routemaster bus driver, he knew what I meant by my approach to driving. Despite telling myself, as I travelled to Scania’s UK headquarters and driver training centre in Milton Keynes, that I was just learning to drive a really big van, the challenge of driving a truck was always going to be on a different level.

Preparation

In order to reach the training stage there are a few administrative hoops to jump through. Having a clean bill of health is unsurprisingly a requirement, so months earlier I’d had my personal MoT and submitted my licence to the DVLA to update my entitlements. Training centres can often arrange a medical on site or nearby if you haven’t already had one.