Its hard to talk about the history of G906BAD without talking briefly about the companies who were involved with building her.

Since the rise of the Jumbo jet, Chubb and Reynolds Boughton had been heavily involved in the construction of specialist airfield fire fighting equipment. Reynolds Boughton with the design and construction of various specially designed chassis for others to build their vehicles on. Chubb built major foam tenders and rapid intervention vehicles on various manufacturers chassis, many of their later models were on Boughton built units. Chubb also manufactured main attack monitors (the roof mounted cannons) that they fitted to their own vehicles and sold to other manufacturers.

In around 1985, Chubb took the decision to move out of the vehicle market. Two of the ex-employees - with backing from the owners of Manchester airport  - then formed Fire Trucks LTD (based in Micheldean) to continue to supply trucks to Chubbs former customers. To this end they designed the first Barracuda. The Fire Trucks Barracudas were a very conventional boxy body like all of the available foam tenders at the time. 

In the late 80's, Fire Trucks designed a new larger major foam tender with input form Manchester airport and this was the Marlin. The Marlin was a futuristic looking modular design (remember this was the 80's) that would allow customers to have the truck tailored to there requirement in a way that was never possible before. The first truck was built in 1989, using a custom variant of the Reynolds Boughton Griffin Chassis and a top hamper designed by Fire Trucks but built by Northern Counties in Wigan. Northern Counties were a long established coachbuilder who at the time were partly owned by  Greater Manchester Transport - who also part owned Manchester airport. 

In February 1990 Fire Trucks LTD went into administration (Reported in Commercial Motor magazine) and was later purchased by Reynolds Boughton, who after a slight redesign went on to produce 6 more Marlins (the last around 1998) and also many redesigned Barracudas.

Our Marlin is the first one built and the only one to have the Fire Trucks logo on the side. Its chassis is a Reynolds Boughton Griffon 5 fitted with a Detroit Diesel 12V92TA engine, a Renk AG HS722-20 7 Speed transmission and Kessler AG axles. The rolling chassis fitted with the water tank was then taken to Northern Counties where the cab and other bodywork was made and fitted, as well as the wiring and final fitting was done.

The truck was fitted with a front crash guard around the time it was delivered to Manchester. It was again modified slightly, which included the fitting of a Maxim 90 blue light-bar to the cab - which was around the time the 2nd Marlin was delivered in 1992 to Manchester.

At some time after this, it was sent to Bournemouth Airport (who were then owned by Manchester airport group) and was used for a few years. However, the truck was too big to fit in the fire house bays and had to stay outside.

Sometime between 2010 and 2014 the truck was retired from active duty and was sold off in 2014 to a private buyer in Dorset. I do not know what his original intentions were but it seems he only owned the truck for a few months before selling it via eBay to a buyer in Suffolk. After arriving in Suffolk it was hired out for a time to provide fire coverage for a scrap yard before being returned to its owners yard.

On the 6th November 2019, I visited the owner after seeing the truck advertised online and promptly fell in love. Even though the truck was out of my budget and needed quite a lot of work I decided I had to have her - on the 21st November she arrived at her new home with us.

Since being in our care we have found out quite a bit about its history and just how rare a truck the Marlin is. We have also discovered the amount of work needed to bring it back to a roadworthy condition is far grater than expected, but have become more determined to do restore it to good standers.

Some of the work we have carried out so far includes:

• Rebuilding of various air valves.
• Overhauling the hydraulic braking system. 
• Overhaul of the air dryer. 
• Strip down of the cab to assess repairs needed.