FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

My asphalt plant was going to be the most modern plant that there was on this planet.

plant that there was on this planet. An old plant couldn’t use recycled material, but my plant was going to. And it would have to be able to run on gas or whatever alternative fuel we wanted to use. It also had to be quiet. There wasn’t anything like that in the UK. But there was in Germany; I had seen it. So, first I needed to raise the money – David would see to that; that’s what I had got him for. Then I needed somewhere to put the new plant. My instinct was to look for somewhere by the river. We’d need to bring aggregates in by ship because most of the suppliers were based in Northern Ireland. Out of the ninety-six quarries that they had over there, around seventy of them were independently owned, which meant of course that they treated you like a proper customer – unlike some of the larger companies I could mention. So, I started to look along the river and found a site at Erith, which Cemex had been using as a store for its own asphalt. There was quite a lot of mess on the site where the bitumen had leaked out of the tanks. And as I walked round the boundaries of the site with Ron, measuring it up and checking it out, we came across the most amazing thing. On a concrete floor next to one of the tanks, we found the skeleton of a bird that must have landed in the bitumen and got stuck. And a few yards behind the skeleton of the bird was another skeleton – the skeleton of a cat. The cat must have been going after the bird, and both of them had got caught there in the bitumen, stuck forever in their chase. The location at Erith was pretty much perfect for our purposes, so I bought it, and Ron set about getting the planning permissions. Meanwhile, John Sullivan and I went to Germany. Benninghoven, based at Mülheim, not only manufacture the best asphalt plants on the planet, they are also very good to do business with. (It’s

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