Wake-up call

Our scruffy ‘in house’ 1975 Triumph Trident T150V, bought cheaply at auction a decade ago as a non-runner, has served yearly as a bad weather, night-time and long distance hack. The word ‘hack’ may upset some Trident owners, but look on the sunny side, it serves as a hack because it’s fast, keeps going and has decent brakes, lights and handling. Forget all the Trident/ Rocket 3 horror stories – other than its desire to guzzle fuel with enthusiasm (that is true!) – simply ensure it’s regularly serviced and keep the revs on and it will keep on delivering – ours does at least.

If the very limited history which came with the triple is to be believed, it had covered well over 100,000 miles on the continent and we’ve now wound this up to almost 140,000 miles. Certainly it rattles a bit but on the delivering front its low speed running had gone to pot. Opened up, the Trident performed as one would expect and it still started easily, but idle speed running had, over the last two years, become erratic – however, we coped.

Congestion

Then last autumn a slow grind across Cambridge was, well, unpleasant. As the engine warmed