The failure of Fodens Limited in The European Common Market.

A parliamentary pamphlet published for the information of MPs in areas affected by

failure of the UK CV industry

Michael T Knowles M Sc

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Historical Text for Hugh Foden Esq and Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust. Subject: Fodens GmbH: Subsidiary established in Munich 1975. For entry of the Foden parent company into the European Common Market, for normal haulage vehicles, I recommended them to market a range of 4- and 6-wheel rigid and articulated chassis fitted with the Rolls-Royce Eagle Mk II engine of 220 and 280 bhp gross. They were specifying Cummins NH-250 and higher powers in dump trucks. Both the RR-powered tractive unit and Cummins-powered 6 x 4 dump truck with 8-ton front axle and 32-ton rear bogie were on the Foden stand at the Brussels Motor Show in January 1973. I was EEC Representative, responsible to your uncle Edwin S. Foden, who had recently been appointed to the post of Executive Director - Exports. Coincidentally, my mechanically minded uncle who lived in Chester was also called Edwin. My first visit to Fodens Limited Elworth Works took place in 1958 using the Crosville route K.30 bus from Chester to Sandbach, and I subsequently borrowed the film on the Foden Centenary of 1956, for a performance in the "Big School" hall at Birkenhead School. I wonder if a copy of this 16-mm film exists anywhere. Unfortunately many of the people involved at the time have moved or passed away. Much knowledge has thus been lost. The film included the veteran Willie Foden, who was about 96 years old at the time and well celebrated. We showed another film at the Brussels Show, called “Fodens the Truckmakers”. It was shown with a back-projection arrangement on the stand, whose hospitality suite was on board a curtain-sided semi-trailer accessible by a staircase. The running gear exhibited was a show-finish Rolls-Royce Eagle 280 turbocharged diesel engine, with a Foden nine-speed version of the famous two-stage gearboxes with 8-12 ratios, legends of their time. By changing about four gear-wheels in the main section, a sequence of eight forward ratios with even gear-spacing of 34.7 per cent was created, the ninth being obtained through the epicyclic overdrive train of 0.77 : 1 at the rear through the third position of the air-switch pre-selecting low and direct range. It had synchromesh on the down-change only and a rather high reverse ratio. Its input torque capacity was 1,000 lbf-ft, equal to 138 kgf-m, hence good for up to 350 bhp. The 4 x 2 tractor was built to UK Petroleum Regulations with RH steering and rated at 34 imperial tons gross (34,544 kg). This was a British compromise between 32 imperial tons current in the UK and 38 metric tons, the latter figure being universal among the signatories to the T.I.R. agreements and thus viewed as the natural new weight for Britain’s membership of Europe. It was applicable to articulated combinations and drawbar-trailer rigs having from four to eight axles.

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I designed Fodens’ corporate brochure for the Brussels show, with an aerial picture of the works and two alternative texts for Belgium, in French and Flemish. It incorporated the heraldic device of the Council of Europe, for which the Fodens Limited house colour of light blue was eminently suitable as the background. To this day, I remember the wording of the heraldic device, which I obtained through enquiring at the UK Delegation to the EEC. It was verbatim: "Azure, a circle, twelve mullets or, their points not touching". I read this over the telephone to Webberley's the printers in Stoke-on-Trent, who were charged with the production of the two lots of brochures. For the best results, I had the French text proof-read by the Rolls-Royce diesel distributor at Bar-sur-Aube in northern France and the Flemish text by a Dutch consultant, whom Edwin had engaged. He was Pim van der Veer, trading as “Events - Opinion Conditioning”. The Foden/Rolls-Royce tractive unit as displayed was unsuitable for sale to a Belgian haulier, although AECs had been assembled for Belgium from CKD kits since the late 1940's. They had a special Timken heavy rear axle to take advantage of the higher weight limits of 13 tonnes on the driving axle permitted in Belgium and a gross weight of 19 tonnes on a two-axle vehicle as in France. In this form it was known as the Super Mandator and eventually had a bigger cab. British Leyland was formed in February 1968 and thus had acquired this CKD business. They had also built a new truck-assembly factory one hour north of Brussels at Mechelen, (Malines in French) on the road to Antwerp. Fodens Limited were interested in finding a local assembly partner in Belgium. Edwin had found Matermaco, which was a subsidiary of Cominiere, a big mining company with interests in the Belgian Congo. They were already assembling fork-lift trucks. In response to my strategic recommendations, your father David also authorised me to seek an alternative in Alsace-Lorraine, which I based on European corporate practice. He said I had a blank cheque for £300,000, so I resolved to find the best opportunity for Fodens, which would put them on an equal footing with their competitors. Among some really dilapidated options resulting from the decline of the local steel industry, I found an attractive new factory unit in the industrial estate of a small town called Creutzwald, just off the (French) autoroute from Metz to Strasbourg. It was rail-connected, with a loading bay suitable for articulated TIR rigs. It was then producing battery-electric vehicles for the big cities in France under the name of La Voiture Electronique, the brainchild of a French minister. Unfortunately they proved too fragile for intensive urban hire service. This altered their future prospects, and the little electric tricycles were only sold on the holiday island of Porquerolles off the French south coast, which prohibited combustion-engined vehicles.

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The Foden tractive unit exhibited at Brussels was technically the basis of another interesting Foden, which was a live project in 1973 and was publicised in June 1975. That was the Foden/RRM Quiet Heavy Vehicle, incorporating a new and enlarged RR Eagle engine. That was exactly contemporary with the establishment of Fodens GmbH in Munich by David. So these pieces fit into a fascinating jig-saw puzzle, which I hope will be presented in the RRHT within a year. In the development of my career, I joined Rolls-Royce Motors Ltd Diesel Division in February 1976 to gain export management responsibility as Distributor Sales Manager for about 100 countries. It took six months to learn the names of the distributors in each country off by heart, and I had to update the world distributor handbook. The promotional event with the Foden gritter/snowplough took place in April 1977 two weeks after BAUMA in Munich, the construction equipment exhibition. The event had run annually from 1954 to 1971 and then 1973. There was no exhibition in 1974 due to economic crisis in Germany, and it restarted in 1977 on a three-year cycle with Expomat at Le Touquet and the N.E.C. inbetween. The 18th BAUMA ran from Monday 10th to Sunday 16th March. The following day, the removal of exhibits started, but Atkinson’s demonstrator Eric Wierdon was not in Munich, so having an HGV licence, I deputised, drove it up a steep incline from the basement and out into Munich city centre, of which I made a brief circuit with the snowplough attached. The machine was then taken to a maintenance workshop to the order of Gerd Koeller, co-director of Fodens GmbH (ex Orenstein & Koppel) for some minor adjustments to the gearbox selector mechanism. Two weeks later, I returned to Munich by air with Roger Parker, marketing manager of Atkinson’s of Clitheroe Ltd. We went by hire-car through falling snow to a café at the end of the Europa Bridge of the Brenner Autobahn, to await the arrival of the faithful Foden 8 x 4. Roger Parker was skillful to maintain traction on the loose snow on the road up to the Brenner Pass. He had to stop the car at the entry to some villages, so that I could climb out and wipe thick, blown snow from the road signs to find out where we were. Having been told by Gerd Koeller two weeks earlier that it would be too late for snow on the Brenner, we met him and the Rolls-Royce diesel distributor for Austria. I told Gerd nonchalantly that we had arranged the snow through the British Embassy, which defused the situation, as he had made no effort to invite any potential customers. The snow certainly made the demonstration meaningful, albeit not in the way intended. The Brenner Autobahn A.G. kindly provided a Volkswagen Microbus and a full load of grit at their main depot. Thus the Foden went into trial service with maximum traction. My contribution to the event had been to arrange a reception at the Hotel Weisses Roessl, at the foot of one of the concrete legs on which the Europabruecke stood in the Stubaital, so I was able to use my experience of the summer of 1973.

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Curiously on a day of light snowfall in March 1973, I arrived by train at the Gare du Nord in Paris with six items of luggage. I had left the employ of Fodens Ltd and left the company Renault 16TS car at the works, with a case of wine in the back for David. I had joined Fodens straight from Britain’s biggest motor company HQ, eager to apply the knowledge gained from setting up a bus components exhibition at the Birkenhead School Centenary in 1960 to a job at BL International in London in 1972 covering products of 20 Truck & Bus factories, with a decade of knowledge, and able to use four languages in my work. Fodens and I had prepared for the crucial international motor show at the Dawn of the Common Market, participated in the exhibition with an unsaleable vehicle, and I had put into the system an order for one such tractive unit with a Rolls-Royce Eagle 280 turbocharged engine, left-hand drive, F.20 tyres, heavy rear axle and luxury cab trim. My marketing plan was to tour France and Belgium with it, hauling a French bogie semi-trailer for 35/38 tonnes gcw and visiting all possible potential new dealers in conjunction with their distributor for France, the Société Albi based in Paris. My strategy was to address these 13-tonne axle markets first, which would involve Foden people with some French on a 3,000 km tour through the summer months, accompanied by a works Triumph 2000 and a Foden 26-tonne 6 x 4 tipper, as widely used in France under the category Travaux Publics. English management who find this too exotic are just the kind of English who killed the whole UK CV industry. My recommendations for Fodens Ltd were only a reversed interpretation of what Scania-Vabis did when they entered Britain with the big-shed LB110 in 1968. They found six truck garages around Britain, which were prepared to eat, live, breathe and sleep Scania trucks until they were awoken by a telephone call to their 24-hour service line, then jump into a service van and drive 100 miles in the rain to fix an engine defect or a broken half-shaft. This is how Scania invaded Britain and also how Volvo started business in France. The British disease is poor management, who have no idea of how to do it in reverse or why British vehicles had to be metric, aided in slumber by clueless management schools. After we had returned from the Brussels show I addressed the above problem of how to make the senior Foden management aware of the reality of actually selling and servicing their vehicles on the European mainland. I proposed a management meeting and fact-finding visit to Alsace-Lorraine, actually a mini-conference at an hotel in Metz, and there was a lorry-park in the city centre, where trucks in service could be observed and examined. By visiting the Chamber of Commerce, I found that it was an Economic Development Area under the auspices of DATAR, which gave inward investors five grades of assistance for establishing new enterprises, like grants for creating jobs, immunity from corporation and local taxes for the start-up period and help with negotiating support services. Alsace-Lorraine was a Grade 4 area, and the factory at Creutzwald was the ideal location for Fodens Sàrl.

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I made all this known to Edwin through the week on the Brussels show stand. He agreed but he was just one of many board members and certainly represented it to the rest. Their response was a re-organisation, in which the UK sales manager was given a wider responsibility as EEC Sales Manager, and I was to report to him. The person concerned was the son of the retired home sales manager and will remain nameless. He had never been nearer to the continental market than Ramsgate Pier, if that far, and the prospect of a position under him meant that all my knowledge and experience would be dissipated in his incompetence, and Fodens would do it his way and not my way, or no way at all. The crux of the matter was that the Old Guard of Mr J. E. Foden and Mr Edwin Twemlow had retired to make way for the young triumvirate, who took charge of the new assembly plant in Moss Lane. The product range was split into the Haulmaster and Fleetmaster ranges. The former comprised Foden designed hardware and the latter was based on proprietary hardware from American manufacturers. The Old Guard had refused to design metric hardware to replace the former, and in effect started to replace Foden Unified hardware with American Unified hardware. This fatal mistake saw them safely into retirement but left the firm a time-bomb, as neither Haulmaster nor Fleetmaster vehicles would sell in Europe. Ultimately I found that the management would not go to Metz and the vehicle order was at the bottom of an in-tray. So I left, went to Paris and found a job at the Austrian National Tourist Office to improve my French and German, by promoting summer and winter holidays in Austria to a large number of travel agents all over France. A summer in Paris was very valuable experience for all future relationships with French and German-speaking people and market research projects. Back to the snowplough demonstration. It was over before Easter, which in 1977 fell on Sunday 10th April. Atkinson’s of Clitheroe Ltd, based near the Rolls-Royce factory at Barnoldswick, subsequently sold 200 gritter-snowplough machines to the UK Ministry of Transport a.k.a. Department of the Environment, but none to the Brenner Autobahn A.G. nor elsewhere in the mainland Common Market. It could have been different, if the operation based in Creutzwald and Luxembourg had progressed as planned. It did work for Volvo and Scania, whose main production and commercial sites in Sweden were outside the European Common Market and behind a tariff wall. The Foden eight-wheeled chassis was a left-hand drive model to a military specification set for the BAOR low-mobility logistic fleet, with the established nine-speed gearbox and a Rolls-Royce Eagle 220 engine. It had two worm axles at the rear, and was different from the Steyr 4 x 4 tippers with 320 mhp used on the Brenner Autobahn. The snowplough had a squeegee rubber bottom edge, which was totally inappropriate for the conditions. Its mountings broke when Eric charged a large snowdrift, so the lower portion of the blade was flapping uselessly. He had already had to re-tension the

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hydraulically-driven grit conveyor, and the lack of front-wheel drive reflected that the machine had been put together from a surplus military chassis at Fodens supplied on clearance terms to Aktinsons, and would indeed have been more at home at Watford Gap. The experience on the Brenner Autobahn was typical of a daring British company showing its wares without any prior research, not making any adjustments for local conditions, nor finally securing any orders. Between British Leyland International, Fodens and Rolls-Royce, I had two years with the leading (French-Owned) European market research group, SEMA-Metra based at London Office. There I was dubbed The Secret Weapon, on account of my abilities to interview in foreign languages. Therefore I was often in Germany and Austria, and had noticed that there was a Foden Air BP refuelling bowser at Schwechat Airport. Hence I thought, “Yes, perhaps one could export Fodens to Austria!” Therefore I made a mental note of market conditions, first on the autobahn from Munich in driving snow. The standard Austrian snowplough was a bonnetted 6 x 6 with lots of power, roaring along with a plume of snow flying off the blade, with floodlights blazing on the cab roof, and everyone got out of the way. I also considered that imports to Austria from the UK were exempt from customs duty under EFTA rules, still in force among members. When we left the autobahn looking for the rendezvous and I climbed out to read a village sign, a noise louder than an express train approached us, and I dived back into the car to avoid the avalanche. This was another kind of 6 x 6, whose snowplough blade was held at the correct height above the road surface on elephant’s feet of welded steel, from which sparks flew as it slid along the sinuous highway at a relatively high speed. No messing about with little rubber wheels whose bearings wore out in no time, whose spokes filled with snow and iced up when the crew stopped for a coffee, so that these wheels did not revolve at all, and wore themselves into a semicircle on the first outing. The Foden’s rectangular auxiliary lights were also not aimed properly downwards and among the Austrians’ winter kit, ours was a novice. They should have done some research. The Foden 8 x 4 chassis was also technically dated. Two decades of knowledge of this make had made me aware that they had short, stiff leaf springs. All continental and Swedish vehicles of that kind had longer and softer springs, often with anti-roll bars and hydraulic dampers at all axles. The German ZF spindle-type power steering was technically better and gave more sensitive control, essential in snow and ice. The Foden worm axles were another antiquated feature, which are unsuited to ascending long gradients at low speed in the lower gears. Behind the Foden factory, where I once tried an FH70 gun tractor on rough ground, there was a scrap area with dozens of worn-out bronze worm wheels. European operators climbing the Brenner would simply never tolerate that outdated drive-system, yet here we saw it on the Foden vehicle for the British Army.

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By 1973, all mainland EEC truckmakers offered 320 mhp for hill-climbing power and the press-on mentality. On the Brenner Autobahn from Italy, underpowered heavy vehicles were seen as a traffic obstruction (Verkehrshindernis) and were simply not allowed in West Germany. From 1972, the power required for the maximum-weight class (28 - 38 tonnes) was raised to 8 mhp/tonne. The Foden/RR gritter/snowplough was within this weight class, and although eight-wheelers were not then permitted a higher gvw than three-axle types in Germany, it would have been behind the market elsewhere with an Eagle 220 engine developing 223 mhp gross/203 mhp net. It needed a turbocharged Eagle 265 (Mk III) for those markets, and an “Eagle 325” (metric power nomenclature) to be competitive with all-comers. My inquiries revealed that the practice of the Brenner Autobahn was to use their Steyr 16-tonne 320 mhp 4 x 4 tippers for snow clearance and salt-spreading in the winter, through the use of demountable spreader units placed in the tipper body with the hinged rear flap removed and the spreader disc hanging over the back. The rock salt was loaded into the main hopper, while the secondary hopper contained calcium chloride, which is deliquescent. “Why do you do that?” I asked. “Because it absorbs moisture quickly, becoming moist and warm. It coats the rock salt particles, sticks them to the road and prevents them being blown away by the wind. We consume less rock salt and save money, and less of it is blown into the fields and land”. They used the same vehicles in the summer (without salt-spreader units) to tow a convoy of power-operated grass-cutter with hydraulic cutter boom to reach up and down cuttings and embankments, and a large trailer to collect the grass. In this way, the high power and low-range gears of the Steyr 4 x 4 vehicles were fully utilised in winter and summer service, so they were valuable dual-purpose vehicles, which the Foden/RR/Atkinsons four-axle solution could not emulate. After Easter 1977 I was sent by RR director George Reeves on an SMMT trade mission to New Zealand. I went a second time to NZ and Australia in October. Planning my own itinerary, I was then able to visit Fodens (Pty) Ltd at Wiri, near Auckland. RRM were then promoting the Eagle Mk III of 265 gross UK bhp. I borrowed a Foden eight-wheeler with this engine to show the local dealer for Kenworth trucks and tell them that Rolls-Royce was the better choice of engine. It was something like a Ranulph Fiennes act to drive an eight-wheeler into the competitors' camp in a pin-striped suit on the other side of the world, and it went down well with the Antipodeans. Yes, it seemed to require supreme courage for British companies to send export executives out into the export market looking for new business, and it was common for British companies who participated in overseas trade fairs not to have anything that they could actually sell to the visiting customer, because it was not homologated, not available, or even just not important to the UK sales management.

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This account reveals quite a lot about the planned and actual activities of Fodens Limited on the continent of Europe, from participation in the Brussels Show after Accession in January 1973 and later through the subsidiary company Fodens GmbH established in Munich in 1975 by David Foden. The structure and history of Fodens in the Common Market could have been very different, had the right calibre of export management been available. The main weakness of UK management was in foreign languages, which restricted their powers of perception. When I was employed by Rolls-Royce Motors Ltd Diesel Division in Shrewsbury in 1976-77, an interesting Foden once visited Sentinel Works. It was the second incarnation of the Foden/RRM Quiet Heavy Vehicle and was in effect a development of the 4 x 2 tractive unit shown at Brussels in 1973, with an enlarged engine of 13 litres capable of developing 350 bhp and 1,000 lbf-ft of torque. The gross weight rating of 34 British tons (34,544 kg) was notional and could have been more realistically set at 35 tonnes for Belgium or France and 38 tonnes for running between the two countries. There also had to be a desire to sell UK vehicles to foreigners and to adapt them to EEC market practices. Unfortunately this country was in a metric muddle, and there were many technical mismatches in the commercial-vehicle industry, which could have been better managed by both UK governments either side of Accession. The problem was to align the practice in UK factories with the majority, and produce 38-tonne vehicles with 304 net installed metric horsepower for 1st April 1973. The UK maximum gross laden weight limit was not increased to the EEC norm until ten years later, and the first British vehicle to be road-tested at the "new" weight was a Seddon-Atkinson with an engine of 287 gross UK bhp, equivalent to 291 mhp, which was still insufficient for the market. The Quiet Heavy Vehicle programme as originally conceived by Rolls-Royce Motors Ltd was clearly aimed at producing the UK's quietest and most powerful 38-tonner for the European Common Market, to compete with the top names from Scandinavia and Germany. I will reveal more detail in a forthcoming article, but now I will stay with what actually happened and saw the light of day. The 38-tonne four-axle articulated outfit was popular in France and Belgium through the nineteen-seventies, and was possible with an 11.5-tonne driving axle and 21-tonne bogie. It was a move away from the 13-tonne axle intended to bring the French and Belgian axle-load limit to the essential future compromise with the 10-tonne countries. During my employment with Rolls-Royce Motors, the company made an offer of £8.3 million to acquire the failing Fodens Ltd, which would have cemented the two companies together and created the Scania of Britain, specialising in the top flight of heavy commercial vehicles like their Swedish competitors. The offer was reported in The Times of 26th May 1977 but, alas, the family declined. Fodens Limited soon became insolvent and was sold off to H. M. Official Receiver to

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Paccar Inc of Seattle. The original Foden company had stagnated once in 1975, and been rescued by a city consortium. This happened because it did not implement the Wilson government policy of industrial metrication. From 1973 mainland Europe became our extended home market, and metric people do not take to Unified products. Had Rolls-Royce's offer been accepted, then Fodens Ltd would have joined the RRM Group with its own engines and RRM would have had its own chassis and running gear manufacturer. The componentry would have been manufactured at Sandbach, Crewe and Shrewsbury and a growing quantity of production would have fed chassis assembly at the Creutzwald factory, with local specification items, and international marketing and administration in Luxembourg. This is analogous to how the expanding Swedish commercial vehicle companies operated, e.g. Volvo and Scania-Vabis in Belgium. Foden Sàrl at Creutzwald would have supplied ISO metric standard vehicles to distributors in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and further afield, who would order standardised or specialised bodywork, say Meiller Tippers in Munich, or road tank manufacturers in the industrial belt of France. In 1999, the year of the full solar eclipse, the Author visited Bar-sur-Aube after the event, and found that the July-September issue of the official magazine of the Aube Département contained an article on the history and demise of Ets Moteur Cérès, the Rolls-Royce diesel distributor in 1993, causing 180 job losses. The rump was salvaged by M Vadot of Moteur Cérès, who set up a new multi-franchise generating-set maintenance and trading company in Bar-sur-Aube. The author therefore realised that a vital tranche of Rolls-Royce history was being lost, and decided to write a 20-page pamphlet as Part II following on from the Aube article, and entitled "l'Avenir Perdu de la Société Moteur Cérès à Bar-sur-Aube", which is a charming French town. This is archived at the six Legal Deposit Libraries of the UK and Ireland and with the main Notary Public in Bar-sur-Aube. In that pamphlet, which is written in expert French, there is a juxtaposition of two photographs, which are attached hereto as follows: No 1 shows the Foden QHV in similar condition to the French 35/38-tonne tractive unit which would have been built at Creutzwald; and No 2 shows the roller-shutter door at the workshop building of Ets Moteur Cérès, where it would have obtained service for its Rolls-Royce Eagle Mk VI 13-litre diesel engine. It is, in effect, the door through which the revised QHV never passed, nor perhaps did anyone engaged on the project ever know of the existence of and interrelation between the two addresses. Foden/Rolls-Royce vehicles with metric engines and running gear would still be selling today, for that was the practical intent and rationale for the UK joining the EEC. Last November, a lecture was delivered on the ultimate Rolls-Royce diesel engines at the Rolls-Royce Learning and Development Centre in Derby. These were the CV8 and CV12 units, which were launched

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in the press in June 1976 during my employment at Shrewsbury. The architectural dimensions were based on the C-range and Eagle units, but the functional dimensions were metric. The bore and stroke were 135 x 152 mm, the unit cylinder was of 2,175 cm³ displacement, the crankshaft main journals and crankpins of the CV12 were 146 x 98 mm respectively to produce a shaft of adequate stiffness, the screw threads and fastenings were ISO Metric, and the CV8 engine achieved 100 bhp per cylinder in the early ‘seventies. Accordingly the CV12 went into the Shir Iran and Challenger tanks at 1,200 bhp. This was in progress while the Quiet Heavy Vehicle was being developed jointly by Fodens Ltd and Rolls-Royce Motors Ltd. Its six-cylinder four-valve Eagle Mk VI engine of 350 bhp gross was the third unit of 135 mm bore, which did not reach production, because the board of Fodens Limited declined the offer for acquisition by Rolls-Royce Motors Ltd in May 1977. The production 13-litre engine would also have been manufactured to metric standards with ISO metric threads. I have worked out a schedule of reasonable threads and dimensions after obtaining comparative data from MAN on their 13-litre engine, which often passes on the Bath ring road in MAN four-axle tippers. They have rear-end timing drive, with ZF metric gearboxes and MAN metric axles. If Rolls-Royce Motors and Foden production had been integrated, the Foden “1000-9” gearbox design could have been re-drawn to metric standards and produced in Crewe for 1,500 Nm input (450 mhp). During my employment with Fodens, Chief Designer Jack Mills was in the process of laying out a new range of spiral bevel and hub-reduction axles. But he and his drawing office staff were overloaded, and this forced Fodens Ltd into specifying proprietary components made to Unified (inch) standards. The model factory in Creutzwald industrial estate was eventually taken by Happich Bros, an automotive components manufacturer based in Wuppertal. Fodens Ltd did aspire to entering the European Common Market. However, they formed their continental subsidiary company in Munich to market vehicles built in Sandbach from American components made to Unified standards, and predictably it failed. It was far away from the BAOR area in northern Germany with large population of British military vehicles. Fodens possibly planned to sell vehicles to the American Armed Forces in southern Germany, for even Ford were striving to remove inches from their Cargo range. The answer to this query may yet come to light from the Bavarian State Archives. The last two Attachments have been downloaded from a Google search on Happich and the automobile industry in Lorraine. It shows that Fodens Ltd would have been wise to take the model factory in Creutzwald, to exploit the growing European market. Copyright: Michael T Knowles M Sc © 2007 (Member RRHT) + Encs

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Second Foden/Rolls-Royce Quiet Heavy Vehicle for 32.5 -35 tonnes

Rolls-Royce Diesel Distributor Moteur Cérès in Bar-sur-Aube France

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First public appearance of Quiet Heavy Vehicle Programme in 1975 with second version of Foden QHV still limited to 32.5 tonnes in UK

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Foden/RR Snow Clearance on Brenner Pass in April 1977

From TIR Transnews Magazin (Switzerland) May 1977 The machine is constructed on a Foden four-axle military chassis and fitted with a Rolls-Royce diesel engine. The special top-hamper is a product of the firm Atkinsons of Clitheroe Ltd, the main supplier of this kind of equipment in Great Britain. The chassis is equipped with power steering and a Foden nine-speed all constant-mesh gearbox. In line with the axle-load limitations in most European countries, the vehicle can be homologated for up to 28 tonnes gross weight, which permits a grit capacity of 16.5 tonnes with the snowplough in operating condition. The long distances that can be treated between reloading stops makes the machine especially economic. At a grit-spreading rate of 10 grams per square metre, the vehicle can treat approximately 100 km. The maximum breadth of grit-spreading is 18 metres, although the spreader can be adjusted to a lower width. The Rolls-Royce “Eagle 220” diesel engine is a naturally-aspirated six-cylinder in-line type, which assures the vehicle of 7.8 mhp/tonne power-weight ratio in fully-loaded condition. More powerful Rolls-Royce turbo-charged engines can be installed on request, although the horsepower available at the demonstration proved adequate for most applications. A variety of snowploughs with hydraulic operation can be supplied; the type on the test vehicle had a rubber (squeegee) bottom edge for lighter snow covering on autobahns, where the surface is always to be kept black. A range of other snowploughs with different bottom edges is also available. Four-axle vehicles are encountered in the normal road traffic of many countries, for example Italy, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, England, etc. This type of vehicle permits high payload capacity without high axle loads. The twin steering axles develop high lateral forces for exact guidance of the snowplough at extreme depth of snow. An air-operated lockup is incorporated as standard in the inter-axle differential, and individual differential locks in the axles can be supplied. The forward-control tilt-cab is constructed from rust- and corrosion-free glass-reinforced plastic with an all-steel frame, affording good all-round visibility to the benefit of the operating personnel. The total wheelbase of this forward-control machine is shorter than that of many three-axle bonneted vehicles, achieving good manoeuvrability in spite of extraordinarily high useful load. Copyright MK © 1977 Translation: MK 2007

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Brochure page 1: la construction automobile en Lorraine

The potential Foden factory was taken by Happich Bros of Wuppertal

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Brochure page 2: quelques unes des principales entreprises …

Fodens Europe SA could have figured in this list of auto enterprises

Published by Michael T Knowles GB-BATH BA2 6QJ