Old hands reading this will no doubt remember when overnighting on the job was a choice of bedding down in a transport café’s smelly dormitory digs shared with several other smoking lorry drivers or roughing it out by kipping in your day cab with a wooden plank across the engine hump.
And in a draughty Ford D series, Foden S39, Atkinson Borderer or ERF A series, with no heater, no curtains, no room and certainly no comfort, then it was really not fun at all. Often drivers had to keep their engines running all night for warmth – hardly economical or environmentally friendly in the days of heavily polluting engines! But the latter option did at least give you a few extra quid for a night out with money stashed in your back pocket.
Then in the 1970s, long distance overland continental tucking really took off and many UK-based operators headed across the English Channel to Germany, Italy, Spain and beyond… and then they started to head even further – as far as the Middle East! And they did it in basic trucks with the most basic of sleeper cabs, which had a narrow, uncomfortable bunk crammed in behind the seats.
In fact, some of those very first Middle East pioneers even went in trucks without sleeper cabs at all! Indeed, until the end of the 1970s, sleeper
