Am I turning into Victor Meldrew

as any of you drove a tractor i have & they bounce you all over the place if you go too fast
& i did let other road user pass if i could & did wonder why some din,t overtake
& the reason i would drive on the road was the farmer owned more than 1 farm
& its the food they grow your eating :wacky::whistle:
 
It's not the tractor driver's responsibility to slow or stop to let traffic past it's the other drivers responsibility to get past in a safe manner, there are many opportunities but people ( mainly older people in my experience) can't/won't use them.

Tony.
 
I'm very good at it Noddy, because I have a car with a proper engine in it.;)

Tony.
 
katkwak said:
as any of you drove a tractor i have & they bounce you all over the place if you go too fast
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Yep, used to go at max speed in my digger out in the desert, bounce all over the cabin, bloody good fun though.......:)
 
Most cars have enough power to overtake a tractor doing 20 to 25mph, even Smart Cars with 600cc engines. Last night there were many occasions when the car behind the tractor could have very safely overtaken, but the driver was not aware of them because he was tucked close to the tractor and could not see if there was anything coming or not. I was very reluctant to attempt to overtake from the back of the queue which was 100 yards long at times. Besides when you overtake a row of cars, there is always the likelihood of hitting the drivers who pull out of the centre of the queue, when he's awoken to the fact that an overtaking manoeuvre is possible because he sees you are doing it.

Mike
 
Worst thing about following tractors is getting covered in mud or sh1t or both
 
most tractors only travel a max of 3 miles before turning off, so your never behind one for long
 
katkwak said:
as any of you drove a tractor i have & they bounce you all over the place if you go too fast
& i did let other road user pass if i could & did wonder why some din,t overtake
& the reason i would drive on the road was the farmer owned more than 1 farm
& its the food they grow your eating :wacky::whistle:
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Don't have a problem with that. When you've followed the same tractor for 15 miles though it starts to wear a bit thin, especially when some of them are so huge they encroach onto the opposite carriageway so you can't overtake regardless. They must be 4m wide. See them regularly. At night they are very scary indeed when they loom out of the darkness on your side of the road coming the other way.

Accept totally that farmers have a job to do. I regularly see (and hear) farm machinery running 24/7 for weeks on end often keeping hundreds of people awake at nights. It's hard and nobody pretends otherwise. But - Many of also have jobs to do. That's why we're there too. Just saying reducing road capacity is to provide food doesn't negate the need for everyone to use the roads with a social responsibility, share it sensibly and with sensitivity to others. Saying it's mine and mine alone and I don't care about the 2 mile snake behind doesn't create much sympathy. Increasing already long journey times three or fourfold at times is a fact of life but exacerbated by drivers who simply won't overtake when is safe to do - which was the original point.

Am sure my boss will quite happily bill my time to someone at an eye-watering rate to compensate for loss of productive time. Where do I send the bill?:whistle:

Just a bit of context. We've just been banned from 200 movements on a 6 mile stretch of road for a CNI project that serves 4m people in the surrounding 60 miles. Instead we have to use several heavy lift helicopters for 18 hours a day for ten days instead at tens of times the cost as well as massively increased carbon footprint. Who's paying - am afraid it's you and me, the taxpayer. All because of an extra load every twenty to forty minutes for a couple of weeks isn't acceptable to the local community. At other times of the year the self same roads are as equally full if not more congested with farm machinery. :confused:
 
Overtaking is THE most dangerous maneuver a driver can make.

Get it wrong and it's likely you'll be head on with another car.

I don't blame other drivers not having the confidence to do it.

And as said on here, most tractors are not on the road for more than a few miles.

I'm sure many of us have gone for an overtake to have a car pull out from a junction that was obscured (little farm track that's not obvious)

I agree that there are many drivers out there that shouldn't be on the road, but the fact is they ARE on the road, so it's best for us to just chill out, stay well away from them, and not get too frustrated if our journey takes a few more minutes than it should.

I've personally had to scrape up bodies from the road, and they have mostly been from overtaking gone wrong (motorbikes)
 
Tractors , I don't mind,they're doing a job and not usually too much trouble to get past, but caravans,in summer and often more than one!!:rage:
 
Oh - @EnthuZiaZT - In answer to your question - Yes you are!
It's in the job description.
We've all got the same job!
 
t-tony said:
It's not the tractor driver's responsibility to slow or stop to let traffic past it's the other drivers responsibility to get past in a safe manner, there are many opportunities but people ( mainly older people in my experience) can't/won't use them.

Tony.
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Might be true in Lincolnshire Tony, but around here many roads are too windy and/or narrow - even on the Fosse Way, a Roman Road, roads that are notoriously straight, there's a twenty mile plus stretch where there are only a couple of very brief stretches where its safe to overtake anything. You might get just one car overtake a slow moving vehicle even if its only doing 10 mph. At peak times you quickly get 2-3 miles of traffic behind tractors many of which do go tens of miles.
 
After reading all the opinions so far on the subject of overtaking something that is in your opinion slowing what you regard as normal progress, I think I have the answer. When I was teaching leaner drivers in cars and licenced drivers in HGVs I taught them that if they were behind something that they were not prepared to overtake, then they should leave enough room for the vehicle behind to pull into the gap in front so they didn't have to complete the whole manoeuvre in one hit making it safer for those who were confident enough to go. So there really is no need for long traffic queues of drivers who can overtake safely, and overtaking is part of every day driving, if you were on your driving test behind a slow moving vehicle and missed what the examiner considered more than a couple of safe opportunities to overtake then you'd be deemed uderconfident and likely fail.
I know it's not as cut and dry as I've portrayed it but common sense tells us that we should leave ample room for the driver who wants to go even if we don't.
RHA, Roy.
 
Absolutely agree Roy, this point was raised on my speed awareness course last year. Leave a gap to the car in front, for a safe stopping distance, then some T**T fills that gap by overtaking you. The thing here, apparently is to drop back and give him /her a couple of seconds gap again. If this happens 20 times on this journey you will arrive approx. 40 seconds later than you would have done. 40 seconds !!!!
But if you want to overtake, do it safely and confidently no half measures.

Tony.
 
Redline said:
Might be true in Lincolnshire Tony, but around here many roads are too windy and/or narrow - even on the Fosse Way, a Roman Road, roads that are notoriously straight, there's a twenty mile plus stretch where there are only a couple of very brief stretches where its safe to overtake anything. You might get just one car overtake a slow moving vehicle even if its only doing 10 mph. At peak times you quickly get 2-3 miles of traffic behind tractors many of which do go tens of miles.
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Roman roads are actually some of the worst roads because although the Romans went from A to B in as straight a line as possible they went up hill and down dale in order to achieve that, creating many blind spots. One of the most dangerous roads in the country is the A15 and this is a Roman road, one, local to me Tillbridge Lane another and has many accidents to it's credit.

Tony.
 
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