Rare Find
Just clicked a text section more or less at random and found wonderful writing, If this is typical of entire history an extremely good job of editing and writing has been made available again some 50 years after it was first published. My random selection
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Mech-c5.html
Now back to my reading
Thank you
Phil
Back again hour later
Wonderful reading – just set the computer to reading out loud “4th and 6th Reserve Mechanical Transport Companies”
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Mech-c6.html so much interesting information about driving what I would assume are largely CMPs across the desert.
“Too much petrol has been used up in yesterday's 50-mile move, about 40,000 gallons instead of the estimated 25,000. One gallon, instead of taking a vehicle the estimated six miles, has lasted for only three and three-quarter miles”
Speeking of blackout driving
“Following a three-tonner is like driving along a lighted highway compared with the lot of the driver who has to follow a gun limber. The black outline of the large three-tonner can be seen at least a couple of yards away and a driver coming out of a dust cloud has sufficient time to brake. The driver behind the artillery waggons has no warning until he sees a gun barrel poking almost through his windscreen.
Nobody ever wants to travel behind the ack-ack.”
Or
“The performance of the four-wheel-drive lorries this night is amazing. Truck after truck lurches up steep gradients and with a final twist rights itself and continues after the vanishing column. On worse than usual banks, tracked vehicles and breakdown wagons from workshops sections come to the assistance of the struggling drivers and trucks. Descending the escarpments is, if anything, a more tricky process and many a driver suddenly finds himself running along the edge of an escarpment with the lorry gradually leaning more and more to one side. How does the land lie out there in all that blackness? To even the truck up now, should the driver pull the steering wheel to the right or to the left? That many vehicles don't capsize is a compliment to the drivers and to the makers. One 6 RMT driver, skilled in the handling of coal lorries for years before the war, comes down one of these escarpments safely. Reaching flat ground he changes, he thinks, to normal gear. He doesn't know he has changed into reverse gear, and back he goes, retreating innocently into the night until his spare driver notices something's not according to Hoyle.”
Been sitting here listening to the computer read as I work on other stuff and it is very enjoyable, now if I can only find the MicroSoft voice with a New Zealand accent to read it to me.