Red Lorries in the Rain

An FWD Sucoe and a very big black thunder cloud

A couple of weekends ago we went to South Cerney to the Nostalgia Show and caught up with some friends who had managed to get their restored FWDs on the road.  We have a couple of these, but have yet to restore them.  Quite a rare machine in this country now, they came over during the war from the USA as part of the lease-lend scheme.  There were hundreds and hundreds.  After the war they were bought up by showmen for fairground use and by timber men for hard work in the woods.  They had hard lives through the 1950s and few survived.  I remember my father using two for timber.  They had a nasty habit of catching fire.

Thought to be the first 'line-up' in this country since the 1960s

When we took our unrestored machine to a show a few years ago, a chap came up and told us that during the war his unit was driven out into the middle of a boggy moor in Yorkshire on a training exercise.  They were left with one of these in a bog and told they could return to base and eat when they had got it out.  That was their training for the D-Day landings.