John Burke's Nostalgia   Transport

Dad worked in Manchester and used to take the bus there and back but that took ages, so he eventually bought himself a moped. Grandad Burke had at one time had a motorbike and sidecar and at his house there were a few mopeds - Cyclemasters. The Cyclemaster was a very small engine in a round box which fitted to the rear wheel of an ordinary bicycle. It just about managed to keep you going on the flat, definitely made you go faster downhill and when you had to go uphill, you had to pedal a bit to help it out! In fact that pretty much describes most mopeds of the day.

When Frank got to 16 he bought a Raleigh moped, a "Raleigh Whiz" as we used to call them.

Even then in 1971 it took it all it's time to reach 30 on a level road!

Good fun, though I still have scars on my hand from falling off it after hitting a brick!

Anyway I remember one day when I was about 6 that Dad was late home. Very late home. We had no telephone and neither did anyone else in the family. Mum was getting frantic thinking he had been knocked off the bike. Eventually she went down to the phone box and telephoned a neighbour of Grandad's and he came up and took us down to their house. They couldn't find out anything from the police and he took us home again where we saw Dad, waiting at a bus stop - having realised that we must have gone to Nanna and Grandad's. His moped had broken down and he had had to push it home from Manchester, which had taken him the best part of 4 hours. That was the end of the moped!

He came home a few days later, beaming with pride, honking the horn of a "sit-up-and-beg" Ford Pop. The Ford Popular came in a glorious range of two colours - black or beige. His was black. The only photo that shows anything of it is this one, taken at Royton - this photo not only shows more of the car than exists anywhere else, but more of our house than exists on any other photo!

The Pop didn't have any indicators so Dad bought a kit and fitted them and they were so dim that a lorry driver once had hysterics when Dad signalled to turn left... Most older cars either had no indicators or had trafficators - a semaphore system where an orange pointer zipped up out of the side of the car to point to the direction you wanted to turn.

The Pop was followed by a more modern one, in white, with indicators! Again this is the only photo that exists and here Dad is proudly polishing it. The only two incidents I remember with this car are: one, being at Grandma Burke's and some young teenager crashing into it on a scooter. Dad rushed out and the lad, who had been having a go on his mate's scooter, offered immediately to pay for any damage. The headlamp bezel - the ring of metal around the lens of the headlamp - was the only casualty and Dad took "ten bob", ten shillings or 50p for the damage. It was probably a good quarter of the lad's weekly wage at the time.

The second incident was when we were going on holiday to Great Yarmouth one year. The rain was horrendous and it was a feature of the way the windscreen wipers worked that the faster the car travelled, the slower the wipers moved. We ended up having to crawl along just so Dad could see where he was going.

The photo, left, was taken a few years ago at a car rally. I asked the owner of a Ford Pop if I could take a pic of the dashboard and he let me sit in it to do so. The little stalk on the top of the steering wheel hub is the indicator switch. The gear lever is long - they went directly into the gearbox instead of having linkages and so came from the floor under the dashboard. The speedo goes up to 80 miles per hour. The car doesn't...

Seatbelts were not fitted as standard until the later 1960s and it didn't become compulsory to wear them until well into the 1970s. There were no airbags and steering columns were mostly rigid spears of metal. There was no drink-drive limit. It was against the law to drive whilst drunk - but have you ever met a person who was drunk who admitted they were? Many drivers involved in a crash suffered chest injuries from the steering column. Cars were built from thicker metal and the bodywork of the car did not crumple to take the impact of a collision as much as today's cars do. Dad liked his Fords and went on to have Cortinas and Zephyrs in the later 1960s and into the 70s.

One of the most exciting cars he had was bought in the mid 1970s. He bought a 2-litre Datsun Laurel Coupe at the Blackpool auctions, bidding for it as a lark, thinking it would fetch a much higher price. No one else put in a bid and he brought it home in a state of glee! He had thought at first it was an American car, but it turned out to be a superbly fast, sporty and yet comfortable car.

Before Dad had a car, when I was very young we would take the train to go to the seaside. They were still pulled by steam engines and had carriages with corridors. Very "Harry Potter"! By the time we moved to Milnrow, when I was 11, the steam engines had been replaced by diesels, although goods trains were still pulled by steam. Frank and I used to go down to Milnrow station to watch the trains and for a short time I carried a book to take train numbers, though that was short lived. Sorry, train spotters, but even then I struggled to see the point in it! Milnrow still had a decent manned station and in winter the waiting room on either platform had a roaring fire going.

We were still going to school in Rochdale and they had slightly different holidays to the Milnrow school. The station master came out to see what we were doing, thinking that we were playing truant. When we convinced him that we were not supposed to be in school he took us up into the signal box and let us drop a signal with one of the huge long levers. He let us stay long enough to watch a goods train go past from the signal box, the driver leaning out to wave at him.

It wasn't long after that steam trains disappeared altogether. The station staffing compliment dwindled also and the buildings got dilapidated. Milnrow now just has a couple of rain shelters and the curse of modern rail services - no friendliness about it.

When I was 16 I wanted a motorbike as all young lads did. Mum was against it and Dad, who had a second job managing a team of football pools collectors needed someone else to cover part of his round which covered the entirety of Oldham, Shaw, Royton and part of Rochdale. He suggested I got a 3-wheel car which you could drive at 16 and so the first Reliant entered my life.

This was EBA 619, a 1959 Reliant Regal Mk IV van with lights of many colours as can be seen here!

The seats were like deck chairs and the engine, set far back because of the central front wheel, jutted out into the cockpit of the car as can be seen in the photo of a convertible model of the same car to the right. This was good for two reasons. One: there was no heater but the engine got hot! Two: 11 years old was very old for a car in 1970 and the bloody thing used to break down every 15 miles or so because oil leaked into the pistons and fouled the spark plugs up... With the engine between me and the passenger, I could change the spark plugs without leaving the car!

This could have got extremely expensive but I had two sets of plugs, a rag, a file and a set of feeler guages in the car. Whoever was in the passenger seat would clean one set of plugs and when the car conked out the new set could be installed in around 5 minutes flat, whereupon we set off again and the passenger set to work on the recently removed set of plugs!

The single windscreen wiper was so weak that there was a lever on the inside so you could waggle it about by hand whilst driving if needs be! To qualify for a 16 year old to drive it had to be under a certain weight. Unfortunately someone had put a metal sheet over a hole in the floor in the back and when we had to have it weighed it was overweight. I bought a 1962 Reliant Regal Mk VI saloon next which I drove until I was old enough for a 4-wheeled car.

Actually I drove it until the engine bearings went and the engine crunched into the radiator, fan first with a huge cloud of steam and a wave of heat into the car. I reached for the gear lever but it wasn't there - it had disappeared through the floor... I've never seen Mum get out of a car so quick in all my life! To make matters worse a long queue of laughing people was at the bus stop just next to us...

I had to push it a couple of miles home. They were fibreglass so it wasn't too hard to push. The two Reliants stayed on the drive for a couple of years until Mum, whilst both Dad and I were out, sold them as a job lot for a fiver! Two cars for a fiver - and she went and got a brand new battery out of the shed for the buyer as well! I'll bet he couldn't believe his luck!

In those days petrol stations had staff who came to serve you. They would put the petrol in for you and take your money, bringing your change back out. They always asked if you wanted a shot of "Red-Ex" - this was a petrol additive, supposed to clear carbon from your engine. It cleared something anyway - a shot of that and when you started up a cloud of smoke would come from the exhaust!