Fire Engines Photos

Dorset had 3 - 4 of theses one was painted white to tow the chip pan fire one was written of in a RTA with a Lorry carrying sand . Two later were converted to chemical rescue SEU. My preserved foam tender was station here B18 Poole Dodge 50 A108 Nel as I live in Poole this fire station sadley was demolished in 2007 to make way for the new one now located on the Holes Bay Byepass road .

Added by Morgan Chapman on 18 November 2011.

Thank's for the info Morgan. With so many of these 'classic' fire station's being lost, our pictures really are of historical value are they not?

Added by Andy Holtham on 18 November 2011.

What an incredibly large blue beacon.

ED: it is a telescopic Dale Stemlite see picture 42575

Added by CraigW on 15 March 2023.

Often wonder about these six wheel converted Range Rover and Land Rover ET's . They must have been incredibly expensive and have less load capacity than a normal Transit van. Was the off road ability used much in their ET role?

Added by CraigW on 16 March 2023.

Craig: The big problem with these was that the weight of the third axle and additional bodywork did not do too much to increase the net carrying capacity of these conversions. But the added space did tend to encourage users to over load them, and when this happened there were very often steering and handling problems, as the extra weight tended to overload the added on trailing axle and lighten the steering- sometimes to an alarming degree!

Another problem was that some had roof extensions, so the center of gravity was often negatively impacted if heavier objects were stored or loaded high up in the body, or on the roof. This was not only an on road handling problem but badly affected off road safety too. Although notoriously unreliable, both Land Rovers and Range Rovers were excellent off roaders, provided that their design weights, center of gravity and weight distribution were not compromised. The military solved the capacity problem with a custom trailer which had a powered axle, which was expensive. But these tandem axle conversions were not very often designed with the original chassis limitations fully considered.

In other countries, such as France and Italy, vans along the lines of the Transit were indeed used as rescue rigs, with a lot of American ones in use as rescues in Belgium, while in Germany the RW1 light rescue was required to be a 4X4, and was always a Unimog. These were of course designed from the ground up to carry a much heavier load than a Rover, and were outstanding off road.

A few GMC 4X4s were used in the UK. These had more capacity than the Rovers but were quite large - and perhaps a bit too big to be ideal in rural lanes in many places.

In Australia, Toyota Land Cruisers have often been deployed as brush pumpers and light rescues, but these have been specially beefed up by Toyota themselves to cater to the extra payloads needed. I believe there were high capacity Rovers for the army, but these do not seem to have found their way into fire service fleets.

Added by Rob Johnson on 16 March 2023.

Please add your comments about this picture using the form below.

Comments

Your Name

Your email address - this will be shown on the page and will allow the system to notify you of further comments added to this picture.