Fire Engines Photos

John Walker in New Zealand, help me out here. We use to have Thames Trader fire appliances at some country centres in NZ, would have been the same or simular model as this one by Marcel. I'm racking my brains trying to remember where? Can you assist, thanks? PS can't go past those Hella lamps! PPS looks like he's left his tin of polish on the bumper, , , ,

Added by Pavel - Western Australia on 04 January 2008.

Hi Pavel, There was only one of these at Mangakino in the centre of the North Island. This had a four door cab and was built by Waormalds if I remember correctly. Somebody else had a Trader based tanker which was simply a ford chassis with an old underground fuel tank mounted on it. This would have had the road handling features of a drunken brick. There were several older Thames based appliances at Matura and Edgecombe and would you believe the Coromandel town of Thames had......A Thames !!

Added by John Walker on 06 January 2008.

John, many thanks for that information. Yes, Thames is a great little old gold mining town!

Added by Pavel - Western Australia on 11 January 2008.

John - loved that description of a 'home-built' tanker. Have met several rigs like that - their hapless crews were not so charitable.....

Regards, from Canada,
Pat_R-B

Added by Pat Rivers-Bowerman on 30 August 2009.

Traders did quite well as fire trucks in many countries, but were as rare as hen's teeth in their native Britain. Two were bodied as ETs, two as salvage tenders for London Salvage Corps and one Alfred Miles bodied pump - for the Ford factory fire brigade!

Ford's absence from the fire appliance business in the UK left the field wide open for Commer and especially Bedford, which made life hard for those of us who were selling D series fire truck chassis after it was finally introduced in 1966...

Added by Rob Johnson on 07 March 2018.

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.