This series started off by looking at the pioneer days of oil exploration and then followed the likes of Scammell into the jungles and deserts of the 1930s. Twenty years later we looked at Berliets and Kenworths in North Africa. By the 1980s the pace of land searching had slowed down, though Gulf and North Sea oil was taking off. Most land locations had been exploited but there was still a need for a small number of specialist vehicles to recover the black gold.
We’ve recently met most of them so this time it’s a chance to catch up with a few also-rans and to contemplate the largely unknown Chinese and Russian scene. The fact that MOL, Canadian Foremost and Oshkosh did such big business there suggests that local production facilities were lacking. No doubt this has since been rectified though, in the case of China, the only ones I have pictures of are difficult to identify or date.
Just about the only conventional script in the one caption reads Jiaotongpai 15DUN Zhongxingqiche, which I assume is what they are, though the final word might be where the factory is situated. The only other clues are 220bhp and 28tonnes gross solo weight. An extraordinary book in my collection (viawhich also makes everything from regular haulage to massive dumptrucks. Anyone really interested can hopefully find out more about these and China in general at website .
