Friends of Newport Transporter Bridge

  A Transporting Interlude In the years 1966 and 1967 I was a fresh faced, cocky, and somewhat naïve college student.    My father, then an accountant with Newport Borough works department, viewed me with a jaundiced eye.    Economically non-viable, a trifle on the spend thrift side and all in all a drain on the bank balance.    Particularly in the vacations when I could be found spending the mornings / afternoons in bed and the evenings with friends in the local.    Solution? Find the wretch a holiday job.    So it was that in the Christmas and Easter vacations of those years I was to be found labouring away as a relief conductor on the Transporter Bridge. In those days the bridge was still busy, even with the George Street Bridge and motorway being newly available.    It provided an easy and short route from Pill to places of work on the other side.    Notably the Orb steel works and the two Uskmouth power stations.    From memory it crossed 4 times an hour and there were often queue