Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Brindley Logistics ·
The Survey of My Turning Circle
Before the relief road is routed round the Brindley yard, the annual turning-circle survey counts in one extra vehicle whose fleet number the fleet list denies and which renews itself a number higher every year.
- filed: "before the relief road"
- reference: "BL/TG/16"
1. This report is made before the relief road, by the undersigned engineering assistant to the county surveyor, at the request of the highways committee, on the turning-circle survey of the Brindley yard. The committee requires the swept path of every vehicle that works the yard, in order that the new road's kerb lines may be set outside the largest of them, and the survey is taken from the yard's own papers and checked against our own.
2. The yard keeps its papers in good order. The fleet list, ruled by the traffic clerk, carries twenty-six vehicles with their fleet numbers, their Makes, their unladen weights, their axle spreads and their turning circles as measured by the makers. The duty roster carries the drivers and the working hours of the same twenty-six, and the taxation file carries a current excise licence against each number. I worked from the fleet list as the survey required and found it consistent throughout.
3. The turning-circle plan, which the yard's consulting engineer draws up fresh each spring for the entry to the site, does not agree with the fleet list in one particular. It carries twenty-seven vehicle outlines on the sweep. The extra outline sits at the east fence, inside the gated collar of ground the list calls the dead stand, and it is drawn as a standard eight-wheeler, to scale, with its swept path swept. Against the outline is a number.
4. The number is the part the survey cannot close. Two years since, the plan gave the outline the number 27, being one above the highest in the fleet list; last year's plan gave it 28, and this year's gives it 29. Each spring the number stands one above the fleet list's last, and each spring the fleet list stands one vehicle short of catching it. The consulting engineer, Mr H Loom, soaked and interviewed under the rules, says the number comes forward from the previous drawing each year to keep the outline identified, and that he does not cut it, having found it on the drawing when he lays the fresh one down.
5. Checks were made. The taxation file carries no licence against 27, 28 or 29 and no serial that answers to the outline's make. The stores' tyre issues run to the twenty-six and no fitter's job card ever opened on the dead stand. The weighbridge book, which weighs every vehicle in and out of the yard at any hour, shows no weighings from the east gate, the dead stand lying beyond its apron. The night watchman, Mr G Tandy, walks the fence past the dead stand on each of his four rounds and his book has never once noted stock there; nor does the muster of the drivers hold a man rostered to the east stand in any year the office holds papers for.
6. The register of this Archive was searched, as the rules require in a matter of counted and uncounted stock. It holds no writ for the dead stand, none against any driver of the yard, and none for a vehicle reported never returned. The outline itself has never appeared on any later paper than the spring plan; the scrap plan of the year before last is in the tin trunk of the drawing office and shows the outline at the fence with 27 against it, the same station, the same sweep; so that of the vehicle nothing is known but the number, and the number is the only thing about it that keeps moving.
7. For the relief road the position can be held. The committee's requirement is that the kerbs stand clear of the largest sweep in the yard, and the extra outline, being an eight-wheeler drawn within an inch of the standard makers' sweep, does not govern the setting-out. The kerb lines are thus safe on the survey as it stands, and the road will be built to hold every vehicle the fleet list owns.
8. What the survey does not settle, and what I am obliged to leave standing before the kerbs are set, is the spring of next year. The plans have carried the outline one number higher at every spring and the fleet list has held at twenty-six throughout, and the question at the foot of this report is whether the outline is climbing the years toward a place in the fleet, or waiting for the fleet to rise to meet it, and which of the two papers the new road will find itself set out to answer.