When I go on holiday I can no longer put my car on the train as I have done for the past two decades.
This is because of the new tunnels.
To tell the truth I didn't even know about the new tunnels until I went to the railway station to book my ticket.
It turns out that the roofs of the new tunnels are lower than the roofs of the old tunnels.
I think it's so the trains can go faster. In today's world speed is of the essence.
My car can longer go on the car carrier top deck because if it did it would be too high to go through the tunnels on the train the lady at the station told me after looking on the screen of her computer.
Ah well, that's that.
The roads hereabouts are more often than not 'clogged' with traffic. That's the only word.
Because of the new low tunnels I now contribute to the traffic chaos in my own small way. In my own small Renault car.
I kept my previous Renault car which was the same height as my new one for fourteen years before buying the new one. Nobody told me I was buying a car that couldn't go on a train. Well, they wouldn't would they?
But at least in this latest heatwave which begins today I can buy ice-cream 'made in Portugal' in Vienna.
A refrigerated vehicle made the 2,882 km journey from Lisbon to Vienna with it's milky cargo. Just one vehicle in a whole avalanche of heavy good vehicles enjoying the clogged freedom of the new autobahns and motorways of Europe.
Often there are road works and accidents. And then the new motorways are even more clogged than usual.
What are these vehicles carrying that they must make long and arduous journeys of thousands of kilometers constantly criss-crossing Europe in all directions six days a week?
We hear of their loads only when they have accidents and the contents spill onto the roads.
Live animals, especially pigs and piglets, are often the victims.
Famously, not long ago a particularly large and heavy lorry flipped over going round a corner only 1,283 kilometers into it's long journey to the far west.
The lorry was from Rumania but its load may have originated in Turkey.
Out spilled the invaluable cargo . . . thousands upon thousands of . . .
rolls
of toilet
paper.
Stay safe and keep cool in the heatwave! And don't be caught short.
Gwil - as you and I both know, the world has gone mad. And to add to the confusion, tomorrow we shall have a new Prime Minister here and we all know who that will be.
ReplyDeleteBoris who will unite the nation, I just heard on the news.
DeleteThere are 38 million vehicles on the road in the UK Gwil. Back to the rain on Wednesday on the Irish riviera.
ReplyDeleteAustria is a bottleneck through which the east-west hgv route and the north south hgv route to and from Germany tries to go. Portugal is on fire again this year. They could use some Irish rain.
Deleteset to be getting hot here in the UK tomorrow in more ways than one.
ReplyDeleteGood one Gerald.
DeletePeople are brainwashed by social media.
ReplyDeleteIt has been 30 C today. HGV engines are more reliably of low emissions than anything you can believe about cars.
Hgv engines might be as you say but when they are moving at snails pace on clogged up autobahns in up to 25 km - 40 km queues between 6am and 10am on a hot summers day you wouldn't think so. The Westautobahn is just a long lorry park when you get within 100 km of Vienna and they are constantly building new ones. It's the same between Trieste and Milan in Italy for example.
DeleteThe overworked traffic police can't keep up with the number of defective hgvs from the Balkans and the east of Europe. Many are not fit to be on the road.
DeleteWe have such strict rules here that smoking diesel HGVs are a thing of the past. That is our home grown hauliers.
DeleteI thought that must be the case. Over here it seems anything can hit the road. Bald tyres, defective exhausts, cracked windscreens, and that's just the east European and Balkan tourist buses. The hgvs are even worse. Police have a full time job pulling them in at the hot spots but obviously the majority know the ways round. Another problem we have is drivers falling asleep at the wheel. The distances are vast. Imagine driving for example from Athens to Amsterdam or Kiev to Scicily. It's no wonder that bridge in Genova collapsed with the number of hgvs going over it every day.
Delete