In 36 days, he meets an extraordinary succession of other poputchiki, and shares lorry cabins, dire rooms and frozen water buckets with them.
The company had several suppliers of lorry cabins; they were produced at the beginning by Tampella, Valmet, Messukylän Autokoritehdas, Auto-Heinonen, Kiitokori and later as a main supplier by Lahden Autokori.
This was known as the Bison and consisted of a lorry with a concrete armoured cabin and a small concrete pillbox on the flat bed.
The final part for lorries was a pre-assembled cabin.
On Saturday, a smouldering fire on a lorry en route to France, which caused cabins to fill with smoke, led to the cancellation of 26 trains, while on Sunday, power supply issues left some passengers stuck on trains for two-and-a-half hours.
After a comfortable night in a cabin on the ferry to Hoek van Holland (cycling on and off with all the lorries is great fun, like going round a Scalextric track), we rode straight on to a cycle path and stayed on it, more or less, all the way to Amsterdam.
About 260 models of lorry were produced, which were fitted with 35 types of engine, 20 different gearboxes, and 15 to 20 types of cabin.
The model nomenclature of the early 1950s was as follows: VK: Vanaja kuorma-auto; "Vanaja lorry" VL: Vanaja linja-auto; "Vanaja bus" Letter B at the end, for example in model VK-6B, meant forward control cabin and L came from extra long springs.
Christos Perlis, a 32-year-old Greek lorry driver, told the Associated Press that the alarm sounded when most of the passengers had been driven from their cabins by smoke.
