Letter - Our exports were best

Your reports on the large transformer being carried through Wolverhampton and Stafford are a good illustration of the demise of manufacturing in this country.

This was such an isolated incident that it made headline news and people were flocking to see it and take photographs of it.

If we go back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, loads far heavier than this, with large low-loader trailers being towed by three units, carrying generators and transformers in excess of 300 tonnes, left the English Electric/GEC works at Stafford almost on a weekly basis. They made their way, via the A34, to Pomona Docks at Manchester and Gladstone Docks at Liverpool where they were loaded on to vessels for shipment to power station sites in this country and all over the world.

America, China, Australia, South Africa and Canada all had power stations equipped with machinery manufactured at the EE/GEC works by some of the best engineers and craftsmen in the world, and the various loads leaving the works were regarded as a normal occurrence, not a nine-day wonder that would never be seen again.

The sad fact is that we can no longer produce or manufacture that which we were world leaders in, and the skills that this country were proud of have vanished for all time. Perhaps if we were still manufacturing products the world wanted to buy, then we would be in a far better position than we are now.

Derek Burt, Poplar Way, Moss Pit, Stafford.