Junk-food bellies, greasy T-shirts and a hairy armful of tattoos probably sum up most people’s image of a typical lorry driver. Trucking is the last bastion of machismo. Only about 1% of truckers are women, a smaller proportion than among airline pilots and firefighters.

It’s easy to see why. Truck stops sometimes don’t bother with women’s toilets, and healthy eating is having fried mushrooms in your double cheeseburger.

That was until Lisa Marie Melbourne, a former kennel maid, kiss-o-gram girl, classically trained singer and vegetarian, smashed through the barriers in her 42-ton articulated lorry.

Melbourne, 35 and a trucker for nine years, has just completed the Truckers’ Handbook. The first comprehensive guide to truck driving in the UK, it gives male drivers a lesson in their own trade and will help a small but growing number of women lorry drivers find their way in a male dominated world.

It includes advice on everything from truck stops and transport caffs to reversing manoeuvres and tips for easy loading.

Melbourne is being championed as the new face of the haulage industry. “We’re trying to move away from the old image of beer bellies and tattoos,” says Geoff Dossetter of the Freight Transport Association. “A lot of companies want to see their drivers looking smart and wearing uniforms, and women drivers are good for their image.”

Dossetter cites the immaculate trucker from the Yorkie Bar ads in his plaid shirt and pressed jeans. However, the advertisement concludes with the bar’s slogan: “Not for girls”.

About turn, please. Thomas Hardie Commercials, a distributor of Volvo trucks, is to use a promotional pink truck to launch its campaign to recruit 100 women drivers, backed by funding from the European Social Fund.

Skills for Logistics, a body that oversees lorry driver training in the UK, recently completed a women-only recruitment drive and has 55 women in its training programme.

It is trying to encourage companies to advertise in more female-friendly places such as women’s mags, “rather than alongside the football results at the back of the local paper”.

“The problem is a lot of women have an outdated idea of what the job is all about,” says Sheila McCullough of Skills for Logistics. “They think you have to be strong to drive a lorry, but with today’s power steering and power-assisted clutches or auto gearboxes you don’t need any more muscle than I need to drive my 4x4.

“And the bigger the lorry the less likely you are to have to do any manual loading and unloading. With most of the heavy articulated lorries you just reverse them into a loading bay and it’s all done for you.

“There is also much more opportunity to work closer to home from regional distribution centres. Lorry driving no longer necessarily means spending many nights away from home. There are still some jobs women probably wouldn’t want to do, which involve more heavy lifting, for example, but there are far fewer of those than people think.”

But there are male-only aspects to the job that Melbourne could do without. “There are still some truck stops that don’t have ladies’ showers or toilets. There have been occasions when I’ve had to get someone to check the gents for me then block the door while I have a quick shower.”

Melbourne, a longtime vegetarian who prefers packed lunches to greasy fry-ups, took up lorry driving in 1997.

She’d been driving a delivery van for Parcelforce for a few months when her bosses complained of a shortage of lorry drivers and she decided to help out. (Drivers who passed their driving test before 1997 can drive a lorry up to 7.5 tons on their car licence.) “I hopped in, drove it for 15 minutes, didn’t hit anything and so they let me drive it,” recalls Melbourne.

From then on she was hooked. Two years later she got her C+E licence and was allowed to drive articulated lorries up to 44 tons. She now drives a 42-ton Royal Mail delivery truck, transporting letters and parcels around the country and earning £21,00-£25,000 a year.

She returns home to her single life in Coventry rather than sleeping in her cab and it’s a much more steady life than the year she spent working as what is known as a “trade plater” — a job that involves hitching rides all over the country to deliver trucks from one company to another. “I only knew of maybe one other woman doing the job,” she says.

Melbourne — whose chatroom name is “little trucker chick” — has never had any reservations about being a woman in a man’s world, although she admits to having to fend off a fair amount of ribald humour. “You have to be broad-minded,” she says diplomatically. “You have to put up with people taking the mickey, you have to have a very understanding boyfriend because the hours can be long and you have to know when to ask for help because sometimes there may be things you just can’t physically do.”

Melbourne also recommends taking along a tall, dark handsome cab-mate. “I can’t go anywhere without Robbie Williams,” she says. “My MP3 player is packed with Robbie tracks and he often gets me through the worst traffic jams.”

The Truckers’ Handbook by Lisa Marie Melbourne is published by Haynes, £14.99

Continued on page two...()Continued on page one

MODERN TRUCKS ARE SO HI-TECH THAT ANY GIRL CAN DRIVE ONE ... ER, IT’S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE

You don’t need 15 stones of brute force and Mr T’s forearms to drive a modern lorry, writes Emma Smith.

Thanks to power steering, power-assisted clutches and automatic gearboxes, you can drive an 18-ton lorry as easily as a Ford Focus, and it is almost as easy to parallel park.

Or so the theory goes . . .I managed to reverse into a barrier within 20 minutes.

Luckily Ian Hendry, of Driver Transport Training, my instructor, had taken me to Gosfield airfield in Essex, a former US airbase where there was plenty of space and no traffic to hit.

Climbing in and out of the 13ft-high Volvo FM7 was a feat in itself, but once inside the view of the road was commanding.

A switch on the gearstick allows the driver to move between low gears (1-4) and high gears (5-. There’s also a “crawler” gear for scaling steep hills.

So far so good, although I did have to resort to two hands to pull the heavy lever from fifth to sixth (no power-assistance here).

Roundabouts were a little trickier. You have to adopt the opposite of a racing line, steering to the outside of the curve, to allow your rear end to follow through without climbing the kerb.

Then it was time for the dreaded parking manoeuvre.

Hendry lined up a series of cones, barriers and poles to simulate a loading bay.

Reversing an articulated lorry is difficult because the trailer is moving the opposite way to the cab so you have to steer against your instinct.

With a rigid truck like this, the only real problem is the sheer size and, for a car driver, the lack of a rear window. However, what the lorry lacks in rear visibility it makes up for with a plethora of mirrors. I was just about to declare it a blow for women’s spatial perception when Hendry told me I’d hit the barrier.

Ah. I didn’t feel a thing but the barrier was leaning precariously. Still, Hendry deemed it a good first attempt and a second try proved more successful — one 18-ton lorry parked.

But could I stomach a life on the road? We head off to sample a slice of real-world trucker culture.

A sign by the A120 near Stansted airport heralds the approach of the Feed Me Now! burger van where Dave, the chef, is doling out mugs of tea and truckers’ fare, getting through 30 burgers, 48 sausages and nine 5lb packs of bacon every day.

It’s a well-run operation parked in a new rest stop which is neat and clean — including the ladies’ loos.

Old trucking habits die hard and Hendry — who claims to be on a diet — orders a double cheeseburger with fried mushrooms, while he and Dave debate whether the “Pineapple Burger” would be a healthier option — “Well, it’s a portion of fruit.”

“We see a few more lady truckers coming through here now,” says Dave, washing up mugs. “You do get some of the older guys who don’t like it, but they’re a dying breed.”

www.drivertransporttraining.co.uk & Times Online