TRAVEL BY NIGHT SIR,—The article on 'Travel by Night,' by
Leslie Adrian, which appeared in your issue of July 11, recalls a journey made by my wife, her cousin and myself in a stock-type Vauxhall Velox in March, 1953. We left Wassenaar, just north of The Hague, at 4 p.m., stopped for an hour for dinner outside Cologne, had breakfast at Bludenz in the Vorarlberg, and, reaching- Lech-am-Arlberg at about 10.30 a.m., were able to enjoy two hours' ski-ing before lunch. The total distance, travelling via Arnhem, Duisburg, Karlsruhe, Ulm and Lindau, was just under 600 miles, and the time taken was eighteen and a half hours, including stops for meals and two frontier crossings. The fast driving conditions in Holland and on the autobahn between Duisburg and Ulm were to some extent offset by the strictly moderate condition of the road between the Dutch frontier and Duisburg, by icy stretches south of Ulm and finally by snow on the approaches to the Arlberg pass and on the Flcxncr pass. • During the night—that is to say, between Cologne and Lindau--we adopted a two-hour shift system.
After his two-hour stint at the wheel, the driver spent the next shift on the front seat, keeping his successor awake, and then had two hours asleep in the back of the car. We also insisted on a ten-minute break at the end of every shift.
I realise that this journey was nothing spectacular, and was indeed positively commonplace by rally standards. Nevertheless, it may provide a, convenient peg on which other non-rally drivers may hang accounts of bigger and better night journeys.—Yours
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