Are Long Nosed Trucks With Big Spacious Sleeper Cabins Legal Within the UK?

I forgot the term had a different meaning in American.

 

Well, yeah, but there are also things like 'straighter'-cut gears in American truck boxes, as opposed to the more car-like 'profile' cut transmissions (with easier synchros) on European trucks. American boxes are just more cumbersome, especially Mack Maxidynes!

I doubt if any European truck EVER offered the old Spicer 6x4 twin stick; now THAT was a transmission that required a great amount of skill!

 

An Eaton-Fuller 9-sp RoadRunner transmission (VERY common in the 90's) was also a very easy-shifter, even with a short-throw shift lever. Whether it had synchro rings or just sliding dogs, it was an easy transmission to just 'float' gears on, with just a moderate amount of skill. I rarely used the clutch after 1st gear, unless I was pulling hard. Even floated downshifts if the hill was slight, and rarely ground a gear. Spicers were also very easy to float, but were such a light shifter with a long-throw stick that you had to be careful not to bend the rods and forks inside the box.

 

For many many years after WW2 Europe was covered with American trucks. Whites, Reo’s DiamondT’s and Macks. That was all they had for the great reconstruction. It took some time before their truck makers and factories were rebuilt to produce their own stuff. Many things are “American standardized”on truck chassis across the world because of this. Australia is one country that decided to stay with the western American standard type of trucks. Kw and Pete were custom building trucks for Saudi Arabia back in the 1950’s. Ford was supplying “Big Job”trucks to Germany.
I met a British gentleman at an ATHS show a few years back that drove right hand drive twin stick American trucks in Britain in the 60’s. Sounded like it was even harder to do with the left hand. Lol.

 

Yes, back in the '60s there was a firm called P&S Contracts based in Yorkshire which ran yellow B 61s and they flew past the opposition. Certainly some, and maybe all, were RHD and reputed to have been imported from Australia. I did a lot of night driving between Glasgow and South Wales, their main stamping grounds, and I used to see what we called the 'Christmas Trees' coming up fast behind me in the dark. In those days most European trucks did not have marker lights so they were easy to spot. It was only a few years later that I got to drive one myself in Australia, also RHD, not so hard when you've always been used to it.

 

This Brit was in truck heaven at this show and telling us that the old American trucks have all but disappeared in the uk because they really didn’t have a “collector or historic” registration base a available like we do here in the states. We can retire a truck and register and insure it for hobby/ toy use. He also said that the scrapper business in the uk got ahold of most of them because the government encourages that more then restoration or collecting. Don’t know if that last statement is true but it does make you wonder were they all disappeared too. Millions of them vanished it seems.

 

I wouldn't have said millions of them, mate, because generally speaking American trucks, especially the long nose variety, are not compatible with UK and European regs. Even the COEs were rare as they did not have the standard of vision required in busy cities and narrow roads. I once sat in a COE at an exhibition in the '90s and was amazed at the length of the blind spot on the road ahead of me. The screen was high with no low projection and even an adult stepping into the road several feet in front would have been totally invisible. Many of the heavy duty ones you spoke of, especially Diamond Ts, found their way towards retirement as recovery vehicles.
If you look at the picture I posted further up this thread of the Magnum, you will see the screen is massive in comparison and stretches down to around the level of the drivers' knees. Why do you think so many of us posers wore shorts in the summertime? The pavements (sidewalks) are littered with swooning females.

 

I forgot to mention that I once drove for an international haulier near to Dover in the south of England. Half his fleet of F89 Volvos, including my own, were registered as cars, a massive tax saving. But we weren't allowed to pull even an empty trailer in England and would 'bounce' down to the docks and couple up to our trailers already loaded and parked up there by the UK half of the fleet, then onto the ferry. Coming back home we just dropped our trailers in the docks and then straight home. Very popular with us avoiding as we did perhaps many hours of clearing customs. It wasn't strictly legal on the Continent though, but he relied on nobody over there realising it, and I never heard of anyone being pulled as a result.

 

I-H International Harvester already had that figured out in 1959 when they came out with the SightLiner cab. NH Cummins under a Flat floor and extra windshields down low where everyone can look up at your crouch. Lol.

 

I see what you mean, did they have sleeper versions of that or were they only for local or city work?