F. ERDELMANN/E. HAMMOND

Through Arjan van Nugteren of Dutch Mustang (See the link on the homepage) in January 2006 I came into contact with Mr. F. Erdelmann. Mr. Erdelmann who is now retired, was employed at Ford for almost 40 years. During the production time of the Transcontinental he was employed as Salesmanager of Ford Netherlands. As he has always had a special interest in classic cars (he owns two Ford Prefects), Mr. Erdelmann still has a large (mainly Ford) automotive archive. Before I visited Mr. Erdel in March he had looked for me in his archive for pictures and articles about the Transcontinental. Altough he mailed me before my visit, that it was not much, I was positively surprised by the rare pictures of the Transcontinental and the Ford factory that I had never seen before, simply because they were only used internally. He also told me the true story about the closure of the Amsterdam plant. Ford Amsterdam was founded to assemble passengercars to avoid high import taxes. After the forming of the EU it no longer made sense to do local assembly of CKD cars in the Netherlands. Because of the big succes of the D-series, the UK Langley Ford Truck plant had not enough free production space left to built the Transcontinental. So Amsterdam got the Transcontinental assembly. This is the only reason that Amsterdam kept operational in the seventies, otherwise it would have been closed long before, just like all the other local assembly plants that Ford had in the past in almost every country. Ford introduced the Transcontinental just after the first "Oilcrise", and had spended a lot of money in the development and in the extension of the factory. Because of this and passengercars sales going down, there was simply no money in the mid seventies to "push" the Transcontinental being a new player in the heavy truck market. So the Transcontinental did not follow the succes of the D-series. Also the unconventional electrics, the weight, the fuelconsumption and the unexperienced and small dealernet were factors that did the reputation of the new Transcontinental no good. By the time that Ford introduced the Mark 2 Transcontinental, the robustness, high quality and high driving comfort of the design were no longer enough to convince hauliers to buy Transcontinentals. For producing only 6 Transcontinentals a day, the Amsterdam plant was too big and the overhead cost were too high. It was believed for a long time that Ford was forced to continue the Transcontinental at FODEN because of unbuilt orders. This is not true. Ford did not tell it to the unions  back in 1981, but the move of the Transcontinental assembly to Sandbach Engineering (FODEN) was a planned action.


                        Edward Hammond" on the RAI show 1976                                           Pat O''Connel alias "Edward Hammond"             

The left picture above showes F. Erdelmann in the middle. When Mr. Erdelmann showed me this picture, I remembered that I had found another picture with the same "guy" who was trying to tilt the cab.Then he told me the story that Ford Netherlands had invited "Edward Hammond" for the Amsterdam RAI Truckshow of 1976. Edward Hammond was the main character in a Haulier Soap broadcasted by the BBC and sponsored by Ford. Is there anybody who still has videotapes of the "Hammonds"? Mr. Erdelmann promised me to continue his search in his archive, so you may see more of his rare pictures in future updates of this site. Another picture with trailer was published in the internal factory paper.

                  
                                                                            The Soap haulier "Hammond Transport"