This is the Bud car and boxcar running between Larrimah and Darwin, was bought up from Alice on Stan cawoods Inter KR11, became a hamburger/coffee place in Darwin and is now at the Adelaide River railway Museum.

Reg Annsett bought out Len Tuit which we knew would happen eventually, they kept the old bus working for a while untill they replaced it with their flash buses.

Next I drove for a mate of mine Stan Martin, had a brand new R180, black diamond petrol engine, I thought I had died and gone heaven, this truck would stand up and dance for you, had a rush on for copper concentrate from Tennant to Darwin, carried one ton of fuel, 3 drums behind the cab and 2 slung on the side of the chassis, no tarps, no ropes, no loading or unloading!!!, I was heading North on a downhill run when of to my right a few horses were feeding, suddenly a yellow thew it's head in the air and bolted for the road, I wasn't about to slow up and neither was he, I managed to get the prime mover past him and he went straight into the chassis behind the cab, ticked me off because he detroyed my tucker box, I cut off his tail and stuck it in one of the upright pieces of pipe in the front of the trailer, I stopped at Maxie Schobers store at Elliot on the way back and bugger me it was his prize horse, further ingrained my nickname!

This lady spent a lot of time trying to help the Aboriginee women, very sophisticated educated lady, rumoured to have had an affai with breaker moran.

Thes vehicles were SO slow but at least you could stand out on the running board and get a breeze from the night air, one of the drivers, Ted Smith took this photo and we bugged him for a copy, after 3 months I thought I would be like swishy and lose my mind so gave it up.

This is the bus/trailer combo that len Tuit bought to combine passengers and mail, this ended my job though I could have stayed driving the bus but would have intruded on my time spent with my mates on the road, plus I would have to wear shoes and act like a regular person, Len had sold part of his property and Co-ord freight shares to Les O'Neil, a wheel from the big smoke which enabled him to buy the bus. 4 or 5 of us were waiting for the Ghan one Saturday, Les was there telling us his son Dennis was going to run the bussiness starting from the ground up, we all rolled our eyes at that being as he started with 5 brand new Fodens and trailers. In those days every truck stoped on approaching another one, stopped for a yarn, sometimes as it got busier another one would pull up plus the an odd road train, we would light a fire and make tea or coffee and sit around telling yarn, lies, the Australian work ethic etc
One evening I was asked to take a prime mover out into the Alice hill as one of Baldock's road trains had split apart, the last 3 trailers pulled out of the tow hook and jacknifed, they were still on their feet and I was able to get around them and pull each one up onto flat ground, they knew I was going to leave Tuit's so offered me a job driving one of their Diamond T road trains.
I did this for about 3 months with a halfcast guy named Tommy Bruin, Tommy had an interesting start in life, a man found him in the bush as a baby covered in ants, the gin's would not have their babies in the hospital, when they were ready they would take off into the bush, scoop out some dirt and have the baby, sometimes taking it or leaving it, an improvement on eating it as they did years ago, anyway, the man took old Tomm home and cleaned himup and he and his wife raised him.

This picture of daphne Campbell, she used to come out to meet the bus to pick up the station mailbag and have a yarn, very pretty girl.

My Bro George sitting in the bus back at Alice Springs, sent to Adelaide for some tin and back on the road in two weeks. Len Tuit chose the name "Overlander as just prior a film company was in Alice making a movie called "The Overlanders" with Chips Rafferty and Daphne Campbell about driving a herd of cattle south to avoid the Jap, getting to them after the bombing of Darwin, really livened the town up!! never seen such action.

My brother george and I were comming down from Darwin and about 150 miles down the road, winding through narrow hilly roads there was a Works and Jerks truck and crew mending pot holes at a bend in the road, the brakes were not good on the bus and George swerved and caught the corner of the bus. he drove the hilly sections as I was still 15 (and didn't have a license!) and hadn't had the experience he had as he was 4 years older, the strange thing was I had been sitting in the offsiders seat for about 2 hours and said to my brother,"I'm going to stretch out on the long back seat at the back of the bus" I had barely got to the back, heard the noise, looked out the back window and saw the door and seat hanging on the corner of the truck, who says there are no guardian angels!!! 10 seconds later I would have been history.

Bob Foster hauling crude oil to the Tennant mines from Larrimah, bit of experimenting here to see if the pictures stay!!

we envied them their quiet ride and WINDOWS!!!

regarding narrow bridges, I think it was a government conspiracy to destroy our nervous systems, that's the beaty of this forum, finding out things you didn't know. I was working this little Austin semi between Adelaide and Melbourne, too light but were cheap to buy and cheap to run, note there are no number plates, this was just after the Hughes and Vale case and nobody knew what to do, 6 months we got away with it, drove the Police nuts 'till we got IS plates, back to bridges, I was comming over the Pentland hills to Melboune, droped down a couple of cogs, went to slip the diff into low and for some reason got between high and low, I was in angel gear, brakes quickly faded and I gathered speed quickly, y'all know what that's like, a bad feeling, at the bottom of the Pentlands there was an S curve across a narrow bridge, I had on a low load of cement and knew I would never make the turn and me and the cab would be history, about a mile before the bottom there was a farmer in a traytop Commer with a load of hay, survival instincts kicked in and I lined up behind him and ran straight into the back of his truck, that slowed me as there was one small rise before the bridge and I bumped him again and it slowed me enough to run up a watercourse and stop, I walked back to see how he was, we lifted his bonnet and there was a 4 inch gap in his top radiator hose!, we both managed to limp into the close next town