Years Zero

For the fifth and final part in our Driving through the Decades series, we reach the new millennium. The noughties might seem only yesterday but quite a lot has changed since 2000

- Lucy Radley

Mel Mitchell has been driving since 1982. “The biggest thing, I think, was the way trucks progressed and the job got easier,” he says.

“The old gearboxes, your Twin Splitter and all that, were difficult to drive so they made them simpler to make it more attractive. It’s like roping & sheeting, it changed to strapping and pulling curtains.”

In some places, curtainsiders had become compulsory.

“When you loaded at Tate & Lyle down in London they used to put a plastic shroud over the sugar to protect it,” Mel remembers. “But by 2000 you wouldn’t be allowed in food places with a flat – definitely not.”

Dave Waterfield took his HGV test in 1997 and has always preferred flat work. “I basically spent most of that decade coming and going from the same general haulier because, back then, if you’d had enough you could walk out one day and be straight into another job the next,” he says.

“It was because I struggled to get full-time flat work that I kept going back – others promised it but in the end I always ended up on Tautliners.”

No running repairs

Another aspect being phased out was that of it being the accepted norm for drivers to attempt running repairs. Mel had been with the same short sea shipping line since 1992. “You just got on the phone if something was wrong by then, unless you knew how to fix it, which fewer and fewer drivers did. “You were expected to carry things like bulbs though – you certainly didn’t go in the garage and say, ‘I’ve got a trailer light out’.”

Alex Dixon was still doing some stuff for himself in the first half of the decade too.