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WW2 vehicles stop in Smithers

A breakdown caused the convoy to be delayed.
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Second World War vehicles drove in to Smithers last Thursday as part of the Western Command Military Vehicle Historical Society’s Freedom Route.

Their drive to Smithers was delayed by a few hours due to one of the war vehicles breaking down.

“The automatic transmission, there was a fitting that cracked and it started leaking, so we did a temporary patch to get to Bell 2 lodging and thought it would hold until we got to to the Junction by Stewart – when we started it, we had a hundred kilometres to make it and we got 20 kilometres out and it was just pissing out we ended up topping it up and we made it to the Junction, but that was about it – it was just dumb luck that there happened to be a mechanic there that had the piece that we needed and that fixed the problem, otherwise we would have been towing it in,” said Bill Ingram, the driver of the vehicle.

“It’s been one hell of a ride,” he said.

Smithers was the last stop for the convoy before heading back to Vancouver.

As to why they chose to make Smithers one of their destinations, it’s rather simple.

“John has a friend that actually lives here and we’ve never been – most of them had done the Alaska Highway of the 70th anniversary – they thought coming down the 37 would be more fun because none of them had seen it before,” he said.

The wildfires in the province’s Interior hampered their tour.

“We completely changed our route, we originally meant to come straight up Highway 97 and we had four legion stops to come and see. We couldn’t see any of them because there was no way to get through,” said Ingram.

The convoy was to originally have between eight and 10 retired military vehicles, but due to the wildfires there were only seven.

They did, however, make Legion stops in Barriere, Jasper and Grand Prairie.

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