The tyres in those days were terrible as well, but still they managed to "mostly" get through snowball earth ... Drivers nowadays, one snowflake and the whole of the England is gridlocked.
Always have a soft spot for a Range Rover classic and P38 as from 90 to 05.i was responsible for tooling approval and dimensional Engineer reports of the Landrover Aluminium V8 block and head and the TD5 head but not block that along with the V8 the 5 cylinder diesel went in the P38 Rangey.
I remember watching this when it was first aired and it was a real insight how the motorway police worked (next to no omnipresent documentary crews with small cameras in those days) Funnily enough I wasn’t in the slightest bit ‘triggered’ of in need of a ‘safe space’ after viewing.
Best film I’ve seen is this, it’s so atmospheric it just seemed a different time back then. How different things are now, with all the health & safety rules, these guys just rolled up their sleeves and got on with the job. Savage winters back tgen.
Ah yes, the good old days of drink/driving and significantly more deaths on the roads than now. Police have a significantly more difficult job these days thanks to funding cuts. 74 GMB officers dedicated to the motorways of the city in 1979. That'll be 8 now.
And he wasn't given a ticket for stopping to help either. All that man would get today would be a Politically correct Bo11ocking. A sodding great fine. And told to F### off, mind your own business, and stop interferring.
they were speaking dutch not german but still pretty amazing considering people who speak english as a first language are not exactly famous for being able to speak anything else i'd imagine that guy knowing both languages and being there at the right time was pretty one in a million odds.
Watched this a few times over the years. Absolutely encapsulates that era of our roads, traffic policing & adverse weather. 2 things.... my interest lies with this programme as I am a traffic cop and have been for over 20 years and regularly patrol the motorways and this programmes shows the DNA that runs through the work of us traffic cops and the dangers ( and the fun) we still face day to day. Some of the working practices captured in this film are still embroidered in today’s practices even though cars equipment and trainings moved up. Motorways still very dangerous places & a dangerous occupation. Secondly, some may not believe this , but watching this programme at around 27mins...the incident with the gentleman who’s crashed his beloved red Ford Cortina...that is a chap who was our neighbour when I was growing up as kid!... He is called Mr Yates, from Haslingden. Still with us & I still chat with him now & again. Ironically he once told me he worked as a civil engineer on constructing the motorways. Quite remarkable.
Just watched that bit on Mr.Yates,speaks a bit like Fred Diana and looks a touch like Robert Lindsay.The Bobby who was dealing needs to lose a stone or two lol
@@tba8241 He does sound a lot like Fred Dibnah, I noticed that too. I also thought the police Range Rover was going to plough into the stricken Cortina!
Apart from the cars being as solid as a bean can, look how much better it was then, coppers not afraid to call a member of the public an idiot when they were, even the public were more civil and approachable and had Respect for the coppers...... just shows how backward we are now , the irony,,,,, thanks that was a good watch
I live within spitting distance of the M25 Dartford Crossing. If there's even a minor prang on the motorway the whole damn area gets gridlocked within 30 minutes. Oh how great it would be to have a couple of coppers with their Range Rover who could move two slightly dented motors to the hard shoulder within 10 minutes instead of the current 3 hours for Highways England to do so.
What Bloody Hard Shoulder ? The Hard shoulder was always planned as an emergency refuge. Turning them into Running Lanes has removed that planned place of safety.
I was on the 62 driving my Morris Minor van from Liverpool to Hull,I remember this day vividly.They actually closed the motorway 10 minutes after I got off it.I was a mere 20 year old,I knew no different.
I was actually on it, right on the top when they closed it, I was on the westbound side just before the Scammonden bridge crosses over. The scariest thing for me was when an Artic was on my offside, he was trying to move forward and the back end of his (empty) trailer started to slide to the left, the wind was that strong. I had visions of being stuck under his deck and squashed. The surface was just a sheet of Ice. At one point I got out of the car and the wind knocked me clean off my feet. It was bloody cold and, it was genuinely scary.
Today’s police could learn such a lot from this, common seance instead of bloody procedure, they got stuck in and got results with a sense of humour, it was the year I passed my HGV and can never remember the road closures we get today in this Nanny state, the police earned there respect those days and got a lot more back from the public in return, thank you so much for this video
@@flalingbashers2957 This comment has been reported for the use of vile language. If you are going to react to my reply please find the decency to use a more educated and meaningful response. I am tired of replying to nothing but common imbeciles who lack the intelligence to come up with something more original.
Fantastic. Not that long ago but a different time. Those officers wouldnt last now, they use initiative, common sense and talk straight. No place for that now.
Brilliant video, i was a hgv driver when this film was made and i can remember the m62 being closed due to the ice and snow .When they managed to reopen the motorway there was thick patches of ice on the road .I was trying to get to Sheffield but they had closed the m62 so i tryed the woodhead road instead, i managed to get about half way when i got stopped and told that road was blocked so i managed to turn back and drove to Sheffield the next day. When you watch what the police were doing then ,they did a great job . But we should be very grateful about the way accidents are dealt with now . Rolling road blocks and stopped traffic while the incidents are dealt with. Thankfully we don't have much snow now.
Pal of mine got pulled over in Blackley, Manchester, early ‘80’s. He stumbles out of his van, well sloshed. The copper looks at his licence and realises it’s my mate’s 21st birthday. He only gives him an escort home, tells him to sleep it off and learn his lesson. Which he did.
A brilliant video, and a reminder of how it really was grim up north in the 70's. Tremendous respect for those policemen, risking their lives for others and not making any fuss about it, and a bit of nostalgia as well, for the times long lost when people could use common sense and initiative to achieve results.
I felt sorry for the poor boggers needing medical assistance and what they must have felt when they saw the ambulance approaching them at 39:38! That whole sequence was brilliantly calamitous.
Ambulances then were basically just buses to the hospital for a lot of injuries. They had very basic equipement and little expertise in treating the seriously injured.
@@Gecko.... They were mini hospitals compared to the ambulances of 30 years before (of which I coincidently have an interest in!), but yes they were essentially vessels for hospital transport. I was just remarking on the calamity of the driving!
Excellent film. My late father was a Police Constable in Hattersley just slightly further south of the M62 and often described how bad the Pennine road conditions were and how motorists would still try and cross. How things have changed but to think there were no air bags, anti-lock brakes and only Landrovers/Rangerovers had 4 wheel drive. But yet some were determined to 'get to work'.
I agree, there seems to be way too much aggression and confrontation these days which is sad. Having lived and worked then though, I am so very glad our attitudes to personal safety have improved since then -- I saw injury and death in the workplace because of poor attitudes to safety.
Atrotious dangerously cold weather. It was the same in NL , west-Germany, DDR and Denmark. I remember it clearly. Our Dutch highway police also used Range Rovers back then. Nice video!
Fantastic piece of archive footage. The only things that haven't changed in 40 odd years are the harsh winter weather conditions over the tops and idiots in motor vehicles.
@@southwest3671 It goes a lot deeper than that. Social media has ruined people's attention spans (that along with other on-demand content sites). People are more entitled, thin-skinned, and not grounded in reality, among other issues. We're in a period of cultural decay because an era of decadence (peacetime and abundance of everything we could possibly need and more) created large swathes of weak men. Inevitably, things are crumbling around us and many people have the stupidity to think we are moving forwards because they saw something scientific that looked cool on some viral RU-vid video. Lots of people are choosing long careers in pointless fields instead of starting families causing our below-replacement birth rate and a lack of fulfillment in young people - they try to fill the void with hedonism and fake spirituality (think 20-something women taking up astrology and a laughably watered-down version of Buddhism where their "meditation" is interrupted every 20 seconds because they keep getting Snapchat notifications). The police covered up massive grooming gang scandals all around the country for decades because they were too scared of being labeled as racist - so they let 10,000s of native British girls suffer repeatedly because they didn't want to be accused of something (and then, for the most part, got away with it and had their records thoroughly scrubbed from existence). I've seen young people who champion astroturfed movements such as Extinction Rebellion and claim to care deeply about the environment, but will then waste away their days smoking weed, littering in public, and being a general drain on society as a whole. The West in general is falling apart, so the next half-century will be an interesting one, to say the least - things can change a lot in just a couple decades. I'm sure that will seem like a melodramatic conclusion to most people, but once you see how rotten the foundations of our society have become, you too will realize it's only a matter of time before various parts of it start collapsing.
This is great back when bobbies were bobbies I.e No speed cameras no ANPR cameras no HATOs. I’m sure safety has improved since then with all the new laws and rules but there is something satisfying about problem solving with whatever is at hand.
Makes you realise how good the police were back then, look at them, hands on, stuck into anything, tow rope on the Range Rover, climbing on the barriers to clear snow, don't see that now, can't see a BMW X5 doing what the Range Rovers did either. They just seemed to get on with it, this should be necessary viewing for all trainee traffic police.
Yeah now the cops are right in figuring what kind of revenue there gonna make up and get out of you, no deescalate, they escalate to get you for nothing there, then they call the wreckers and sit down and tally up the revenue they gotout of poeple, no more serve and protect, its harass and collect
looked to me like they really ran those range rovers into the ground doing what they did with em back in them days, don't reckon them Rovers made it past 10 years of hard graft.
I was a traffic officer in the 1990 for 10 years before I became a detective. Our top priority was to look after the injured , investigate and to remove obstructions . We just dragged things out of the way with Range Rovers and tow ropes. This was to keep traffic moving. Nowadays you see the Highways officer sitting behind broken cars waiting for tow trucks that are stuck in the traffic jams. Ged
You have to say that those copper, ambulance men, and firefighters were proper heroes. Even the motorists that were injured just took it in their stride.
1979, I was fifteen and living with my mum and dad in south east London. Life back then seems a million miles away from the politically correct, health and safety driven times we live in now. Back then they just cleared the road and caused as little delay as possible. Nowadays they cordon off the M25 for six hours if a leaf blows across the carriageway.
When coppers were proper coppers and used common sense, and nobody wanted to sue them for sneezing. I used that stretch every day for 11 years and, the night it was closed by heavy snow on the top I was stuck on it for hours. Some of the scenes they cleared in minutes would have the motorway shut in both directions for three days now. They need a full shift to do the risk assessment before they can get out of the car. As for the mighty Range Rover or the Defender, what a sorry state JLR has become. Today it's nothing but a footballers wifes posh handbag carrier. JLR should be made to study this film to make them realise how they've Destroyed the best 4x4 there ever was.
CARA, ESSES PATRULHEIROS DE TRÂNSITO DE RODOVIAS INGLESAS TRABALHAVAM, E MUITO, ISSO, EM 1979, QUE DEMAIS!! PERCEBE SE O AMOR E DEDICAÇÃO DELES EM SALVAR VIDAS, PARABÉNS!! COM TODA A CERTEZA, ALGUNS JÁ SE FORAM, E OS QUE AINDA ESTÃO ENTRE NÓS, DEVEM TER ENTRE 70 E 80 ANOS, OU MAIS. ADOREI, AMEI ESSE EXCELENTE E MARAVILHOSO VÍDEO!!
Just realized how old I am! I can't believe I was driving a ford D series then. I now drive a very modern Scania and unfortunately at lot of them accidents still happen today ! I retire in a few years 😅
Remember watching this when it was first made on TV; brilliant documentary, vividly filmed, immaculately edited, full of danger and humour, the latter needed in such awful weather. Glad I found it again after all these years.
OK, now I have watched all of it = just about one of the very best things ever filmed and certainly the greatest must-see on RU-vid (as there's mostly crap otherwise on offer ; but try Second Side Up!).
Remember back in those days the ambulances weren't the paramedic units we have today, they were basically just to transport you to the hospital and most ambulance workers were employed by the council.
@@michaelgrace1298 One of my schoolmates got run down by a van. The two policemen who attended put him in the back of their panda car and drove him to the local A&E: no first aid, no checks for broken bones, no nothing.
Any vehicle with a first aid kit can be called an ambulance. I think ambulances of this era had oxygen and and a ventilator and that's about it. I think trauma doctors would go out on certain jobs but that was on London only I think.
As an 8 year old when this was filmed the snow was great, schools were shut and we used to break the icicles off houses with snowballs, no loft insulation back then. Driving in this must have been hell. Those coppers were typical 70's blokes, roll your sleeves and crack on, unlike today sadly......risk assessment anyone!!
Quality film when coppers where coppers. Its like it was a competition to keep it open. When the ambulance hit the police car and the copper said well we didnt need that car.
yonmons Thank you for posting this, I remember well seeing this. Watching with my Father as a 14 year old. He was a wagon driver, I do miss him and wish I could share this with him. I am in awe at GMP and had friends who worked in traffic. Respect.
@@milesfinch It's more down to better understanding of mechanism of injury and traumatic injuries, plus the fact that vehicles are a fair bit quicker these days... There weren't many vehicles on the road back then that could break 100mph, now pretty much everything, even your gran's motorised shopping trolley, can. People crash faster and harder these days...
@@gosportjamie yes but cars back then had no real safety I crashed a e rev fiat panda at 10mph complete write off bet cops went to some horrific crashes then
My goodness what a winter that was I remember it well, it actually started in 1978 and over flowed eventually into 1979 I was on the M62 three times a week getting on at Howden and doing delivers in West Yorkshire and on Mondays down to Manchester Airport.Everyone talks about the beast from the East compared to 78/79 in my mind it was a snow flurry, as winter's go, we are on the East Coast and it wasn't that bad but of course some places were effected more than others.
Whenever I watch things like this, I always imagine going back in time and telling them all about what things are like in the future and how much has changed. They’d look at me like I was an alien 😂
1979 when every copper seemed to be a moustacheio man 🥸🥸🥸😂😂. Playing chicken on the motorway removing debris 😂. That was so normal back then, how things have changed. Great vid.
Have to agree, a copper was someone you feared and respected. Nowadays, they just get hassled and cheeked back to, adults and kids. Love them Range Rovers though.
@@Jack-hg1hq I agree that certain abuses of power do happen, deliberate and by mistake. However, a cuff around the ear from a copper was something you dare not tell your mum and dad about because you would have got another. Many of the lads I grew up with would have gone the wrong side of the law if it wasn't for community policing, talking to people and yes...a cuff and a bollocking. Children nowadays, do lack respect-foul language is the norm, treating people and property with contempt. They say that upbringing is key and it isn't the job of the police or teachers but parents to bring their children up and know right from wrong...that is true. But, when you have kids having no parental control then they just run amok around towns etc and misbehave at school. Kids with no seat belts on, mobile phones glued to their ears-I see this everyday-no respect for the law.
@@eddiesolo1971 yeah pretty much, I'm 21 and are ashamed of my generation, don't understand how they talk or act etc. When they act out they get a free therapy session and some more money. A slap would cost the tax payer a lot less and be far more effective. I now live in fear of going outside from the gangs, moped thief's, knife crime etc. And I'm young and healthy. Imagine what that's like for an old lady. Howevrr The police in Derbyshire where I live direct the power in the wrong direction. They spend all their money making sure no-one does 51 in a 50 yet allow gang fights in our towns. That's not a police force I can get behind I'm afraid
A time when traffic police were a welcome sight. Doing what they did and no health and safety, just did what needed doing. The police of today could learn a lot from these guys. I remember that winter and man was it bad. Schools were shut as the heating wouldn't work, no buses, no milk, total chaos...and guess what, we got through it. The younger generation these days would be clueless.
I was in infant school at that time and even in East Anglia the winter was bad, with drifting snow. Nowadays I live in the central south (Berkshire) and the weather is barely ever anything more than temperate. If it does ever snow, it is generally clear after a couple of days and it never gets anywhere near as bad as it does up north...! At the moment I can only conclude that this is a good point, as medically that much cold would probably dramatically shorten my life...!!!
That was brilliant! I can’t believe how hands on the cops were. They wouldn’t bother with half of that nowadays. They’re leaving it to the ambulance crews, and recovery trucks.
What has happened to this country in the name of politics, bureaucracy and progression is heart breaking! Real people facing real life using common sense, nous and whats at hand! not one fucking mobile device.....breath of fresh air.....sweet motors too!
Oh turn it in will you. I suggest you spend a couple if days with the motorway cops of now in wintertime on the same stretch of motorway. I think you'll find that nothing much has changed for these poor souls who have to police these horrid stretches of the M62 in winter.
I drive the M62 almost every day, fascinating documentary and even now the uppermost stretch is wild and remote. As someone who has to travel between Yorkshire and Cheshire for work, this road is a lifeline, especially in the winter.
You poor guy. No amount of money woukd make me drive thus journey to work everyday. I'd rather work in Morrisons in Bradford on £8 an hour than go through that everyday.
I drove from Shaw (Oldham) to Leeds commuting. Never seen the weather as bad as this but have known it to snow. It's a great road apart from the horrible traffic!
From the days before the police dressed in para military kit merely to make themselves look tough but actually were tough and realised the public didn’t need to be told everything is a danger! I love all the old cars too!
I started my driving career in 1980 driving vans & then HGVs until 2016, the M62 was a regular run until 2008 when I went local only (Bristol to Wales). Great police in those days 'up north' & one incident springs to mind. Driving vans for a printing company in Bristol my boss informed me in 1984 that he was buying me a brand new VW LT35 6 cylinder diesel van, these were fast!! Driving over the M62 & reaching the top of a hill in the 3rd lane & starting a downhill run passing 2 lanes of now accelerating trucks I looked at my speedo to see I was doing 80mph & still accelerating, as I passed the trucks & pulled in to the inside lane I noticed a police Range Rover following me. He stayed behind as I pulled into the services & stopped beside me, as the driver walked over to me I was expecting a speeding ticket...no... his words stay with me still....." Is that one of those new 6 cylinder turbo diesels?" I said yes & turning to his mate he says " I knew it was the moment he hit 90mph, I told you they were quick!" turning to me he said "Just hold the right foot back a bit driver, I know you were passing the trucks but it only takes a second to lose control" & off they drove....& no ticket!
Blimey, looks like that Cortina at 28:18 went back on the road! Last taxed in 1989! On top of that, the Rolled Datsun at 42:10 was repaired (or rung..) & went on till 87!
This is like opening up a motoring time capsule of pure Gold. Absolutely AMAZING footage of bygone times from my early childhood. Great upload. Thank you, this was a pure pleasure to watch. !
This is the second time I viewed this wonderful real life coverage. Last was when it was first aired, all those years ago ;-) Did not observe the ambo hitting the cop car on the first. Too fast brother! Pleased I wasn't on traffic shift that night!! Good to see once again. Iain
Great, i drive on this bit of the m62 every day, hasnt changed much, still the same bad drivers, all the cortinas have turned into audis and bmws...a good film, with bad winters and police that would help out...i was ten when this was filmed but my dad was a regular motorway driver then, he always had fords, loved the cortinas and escorts....
