A bumpy road ahead...

.. well maybe not the road itself, but the Speed Bumps are something else.

If you go to County School Station, beware, go carefully and VERY, VERY SLOWLY and if your car is in any way low - avoid taking it down the road at all.

The Mid Norfolk Railway purchased the road for a nominal charge, resurfaced it and 3 days later put in the SEVEN fearsome speed bumps you have today, they obviously do not read the motoring section of the Saturday Telegraph which has been carrying many letters on the subject of speed bumps, the damage they cause and the remedies open to people whose cars they have damaged.

Local Authorities are now starting to remove the bumps because mounting evidence shows that they cause damage to alloy wheel rims (a new set for a BMW or Mercedes is around £5000), damage to tyres, damage to front suspensions (especially with front springs which are regularly reported as breaking) and broken and ripped off exhausts. Low vehicle are particularly at risk, my wife has a Renault Kangoo adapted to drive from a wheelchair, the speed bumps at County School hit all along the underfloor, which, coupled with other badly designed measures, resulted in one of the brackets holding on the fuel tank to break - a potentially very dangerous scenario, imagine ripping the fuel tank off on the next bump, it doesn't bear thinking about!

The normal advice from the newspaper is to pursue the matter in the Small Claims Division of the County Court (if it is less than the limit) and almost all cases are won on default, Local Authorities and their insurers are finding them difficult to defend, the same will almost certainly hold true with the Mid Norfolk Railway, the only difference is they won't have the resources to defend the action in the way that a local authority potentially could so it would depend on the view of their insurers.

Whilst taking photographs for this article two of the half dozen vehicles going over the bumps grounded on their undersides and they were all going very slowly, you only have to look at the tops of the humps to see how often vehicles scrape over them, and as for the stones at the sides, it is all too easy to visualise someone ripping a wheel and suspension off when there is snow covering them.