YOU WRITE
Having been involved at the Trolleybus Museum at Sandtoft for many years, including doing most of the in-house MoT inspections, I feel I can respond with reasonable confidence to Robin Hannay’s questions about Walsall trolleybus 342 (You Write, January).
Much of general manager Edgley Cox’s work in the 1950s was focused on making vehicles lighter for the same or a larger payload. A weight-saving feature (of at least 10cwt) in the mechanical specification of the pioneering two-axle 30ft Sunbeam F4As of 1955/56 was their Lockheed high-pressure hydraulic braking system; 342 also has hydraulic brakes.
There is no evidence of the chassis frame being extended or cut-and-shut between the axles. Mike Dare used to tell a story that 342 had been extended using part of a Bristol Lodekka chassis (perhaps from the same root as the Dennis Loline theory), but there is no evidence to support this.
In most respects, the chassis is essentially an F4A frame, and I would suggest that Edgley Cox may have sourced a couple of spare longitudinal members from the Sunbeam works, not far away in Wolverhampton, possibly on the back of the order for the second batch of ‘goldfish bowl’ F4As.
Three of the four ex-Grimsby-Cl…
