The 2009 Annual Australian Velocette Owners Club rally is about to start....called the TT Rally it is to be run for a week based from Donnelly River, some 4 hours south of Perth, Western Australia.
I live in Sydney on the East Coast of Australia as do a large percentage of the 700 or so club membership.....but the WA crowd are a resorceful lot and took up the challenge again to run a large national Velocette rally, again with an international flavour...they last did it in 2003 when they ran the Cape to Cape Velocette Rally, at nearby Margaret River.
A great success.....
They had a large international attendence then as now and John Jennings, JJ to his friends, has co-ordinated it again and tells me over 10% of the entrants are Internationals, all loaned Velos by WA locals.... on ya John and the lads....
In 2003 I drove over, trailering two Velos with three in the car, a 10,600km round trip....Jim Day and I rode 500cc Velos over and back in 1969...for a while I had a rush of blood to the head and the thought of redoing the ride, some 40 years later entered my mind...but only for a little while, then, for me anyhow, reason prevailed and 10 hours in a plane plus 8 hours in a rental car seemed a lot easier than 12 days in my car or on my Velocette's seat....
Yes I know...a whimp!
There is to be one Velocette ridden across this year, Stuart Hooper from Brisbane has set off to ride the 5000km there...but he will ship it back.
A real rider.....
So how to get a Velocette, rather a quantity of Velocettes over to the rally?
Clubmember Lee Hewitt in Melbourne works in the shipping game and came up with a proposal to fill 20 foot shipping containers with Velos from Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, all to be on the same ship to Freemantle, a port near Perth, WA, then road freight to the rally and the return trip to be via rail across Australia...this being the most economical way to do the exercise.
Almost immediately it started to unravel...the Melbourne container cancelled out, then the Sydney container was unhappy with the shipping idea and opted for rail over, then the Brisbane container, a week or so before loading was due faced a cancellation of the shipping date and were forced to also rail across...
We used a Perth based transport company, Sadleirs Transport, the Sydney container loaded with 9 Velos plus at the last minute a Velo replacement, a BMW....caused a little hiccup in the loading due to it's size, 10 bikes in all.
The Brisbane container loaded with 8 Velos.
The trains re-assemble in Parkes, some 300km west of Sydney into a 2.5km long train with 4 huge diesels locomotives for the 4000km run across Australia.
In Perth JJ, who had bought two Velos in Brisbane and used the Brisbane container to transport them across, opened the Brisbane container in Sadleirs Perth yard and recovered them. Then Cutts transport of Manjimup, some 20km from Donnelly River transported both containers to their yard. Tomorrow, Friday, both containers are delivered via a side lift truck to the rally site and we will unload them Sunday at the start of the rally.....
Following are a series of photos of the container loading in Sydney and JJ collecting his bikes in Perth.
Likely my next blog will feature some of the rally with a followup in future blogs....
Left click on the images to enlarge.....
Think of me, Velocetting over the next week.....
Sadleirs Sydney yard...load starts
As well as two tie-downs front and rear, wooded slatts aside the wheels, screwed to the next bikes slatts, old sleeping mattresses, recovered from the roadside cleanup campaing, were slid down between each bike so it one came free it would likely not damage the next bike.
Sadleirs yard in Perth, the Brisbane container awaits JJ
John's "new" Velocettes, both 1948...a 350cc MAC and a 500cc MSS.
No comments:
Post a Comment