SANDBACH

As you may known and as you can read in the other sections, after the closure of the Amsterdam plant, Ford continued the assembly of the Transcontinental in Sandbach. For the assembly of the last 504 Transcontinentals (LHD and RHD) in Sandbach, again complete cabs came from Berliet just like Ford did in the first productionmonths in Amsterdam. The assembly in Sandbach started in March 1982. With the move to Foden, Ford introduced also another habit from the past, from March 1982  you could order every cab color as long it was white! Just take a close look to the latest color charts in the section "brochures" and you will convince yourself that this statement is true. Sandbach built Transcontinentals can easily be recognized by the chassisnumber, were the chassisnumber starts with "SFA", were the chassisnumber of the "Amsterdam" built Transcontinentals starts with "XLR". In contrary to the rolling number of the Dutch built Transcontinentals, the last 5 digits of the Sandbach chassisnumbrs are the exact build sequence number. But there is mystery: A Transcontinental collector in the UK owns a LHD Sandbach produced Transcon with the chassisnumber ending on 507. This would suggest that the number of 504 is not correct. At the moment I am trying to find the explanation for this, in the past it was common to scip certain chassisnumbers for various reason. Unfortunately 507 is is in a terrible condition, but maybe one day it will get back on the (Continent) roads again. Althought the building statistics show a production of 14 Transcontinentals in 1984, this is not correct. The Transcontinental production at FODEN stopped in December 1983, exactly 2 years after the production in Amsterdam stopped.

 The "handover"of the first 5 UK built Transcontinentals to Unispeed         Remains of last produced and highest know chassis number "507"