NCA129 was built in 1956, and operated by Wrexham Farm Services, until in the early
1960s it moved over to Windsor Garage in Llandudno, North Wales.
There the 10cwt Thames was used by garage owner Bruce Turner, for light recovery duties until he sold up, some years later.
Bruce turned his attentions to running a caravan site up in the Conway valley of North Wales, taking the little commercial with him.
For many years it served as a runaround until bodily decay rendered it too bad to continue using.
NCA was parked up in a field, and left to moulder, in the company of several equally 'distressed' Morris Minors.
And there it continued to sit, year on year, gradually crumbling away. In May 1989,
I went caravan camping with my folks and we stayed at Bruce's site, me going in my venerable 1960 Austin A40.
I got talking to Bruce about elderly motors, and it came up in conversation that he had some Minors and a Thames sat in a field ...
by this point I was getting interested and was soon on the scene, weighing up the 'finds'. The Minors were (are) pretty shot and good only for
spares, but the E83W was another matter. Although equally deteriorated, it had to be worth rescuing.
After many lengthy negotiations, a deal was struck, and later in the year Dad's XJ6 was pressed into service, towing NCA home.
Storage was a problem at first, but eventually I secured a lockup garage in Cheadle (Cheshire) and started to tinker away.
At that time I had a number of other project vehicles, not least a bullnose SAAB 95 van, '34 Vauxhall, Spitfire, XJ12 S1 and
of course the A40, so work on NCA was limited. However I got her running, and can be seen alongside being 'tested' :) -
the first time she'd run in many a year. The smoke was largely due to the many freeing off substances I'd dropped down the plug holes ....
once it had burnt off, the engine proved itself to be in fine fettle. In fact, the eagle-eyed viewer can just see the A40 behind the smokescreen,
a 1960 example bought new by my great-uncle and still in the fleet today (mid rebuild).
To learn more about the E83W truck, please see my sister site all about the Ford Thames E83W
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