Passion for fire engines still ablaze

MOTORING NEWS - That neighbour's car parked outside looked so cool.

The steam tug down at the Cape Town docks looked so handsome and busy and smelt so good.

The double-decker tram pulling out of the bus shed looked so proud and shiny.

I really wanted to have all these beauties to play with.

I was 13 years old and this was the late 1960s. What I wanted could not be bought in local toy shops. Most or all models were way out of range of my pocket money.

Deciding to build these must-haves I found that I could, over time and by trial and error, build pretty convincing replicas.

In those days it was cardboard shoe boxes, sticky glue, paper and my mother's crossword puzzle ballpoint pen. Many little and not-so-little models rolled off our cramped kitchen table in Woodstock, Cape Town.

After many boring years at school, I joined the Cape Town fire brigade. During my service from 1972 to 1989 at the Wynberg station, I decided to build one of our engines.

With paper, pen and a one-foot ruler, I measured and drew up plans of our turnout fire pump. Out of that, a year later, came a half-inch to a one-foot cardboard model of Delta One. She was a very handsome and shapely thing. Everything opened and closed on this model and she had all her equipment on board.

Some years later I reluctantly gave her up to a begging fireman colleague for R100, who had started a home-based fire brigade collection. He still lives among his vast collection in Cape Town. The plans were later stored in a file in a box in a long-forgotten store.

In 2006 they were largely destroyed in a Cape Town rainstorm flood. Carefully dried out and copied for safekeeping, the desire came to build another fire engine.

This time it would be the first turnout pump of the Roeland Street fire station in Cape Town.

Alpha 1 had a fine collection of stunning wooden ladders atop. The main ladder was a one-ton wheeled escape with carriage wheels. She was the last fire engine to carry this big, old ladder. Today, it's a museum piece at Roeland Street fire station.

Now, 37 years later, the second model fire engine has been completed. All her equipment is on board with ladders that can be slipped and rehoused. Going a bit back in time as my dad spent his career in the fire services.

When I joined in 1972, he happened to be the training officer and I soon found out that in those terms I wasn't his son. Training was very physical in a sun-bleached drill yard.

On one such a hot day, one of the recruits messed around during a drill. We were made to take that ugly one-ton ladder off and put it back on that engine over 10 times. I think I hated that ladder and my old man after that.

Today, I think, I am at peace after building a smaller version of it. Everything works, except the pedals and some small equipment.