London Traffic Cameras Fine 100-year-old Museum Car

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London's new congestion charging scheme has trapped an unusual victim in the shape of a 105-year-old Daimler that has been a museum piece for half a century.

The cameras monitoring the scheme picked up the number plate Y99, and a demand for the payment of an 80 pound (130 dollar) fine was sent out to the Daimler, which has not moved from its spot on the floor of the Bristol Industrial Museum since 1978.

Fiery Liz, as the car is known, dates from 1898 and has a maximum speed of 25 kilometres an hour. It has been on display at various museums in the western English city since 1947.

Transport for London bosses blamed a computer glitch, but the museum still has to go through the laborious appeals process, or the fine will mount.

Assistant curator Sarah Riddle said: "We are pretty confident that the car has not been in London, considering it has not moved since it came to us.

"It does not tend to get around much these days. We were certainly surprised to receive the notice but we still have to officially appeal and send images of our vehicle."


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The ups-and-downs a computerized world, I guess.

A couple of years ago, we got a ticket sent to us due to a computerized picture that showed "our" Toyota running a toll booth. Trouble is...plates matched but the car wasn't a Toyota. More recently, my brother got a ticket for illegal parking of his Jetta in Newark (NJ).....but the Jetta has never even been in Newark.
Apparently what's happening is; people "doctor" their plates with black paint (changing 3s to 8s, etc.). My brother had to take a day of and drive to Newark to find this out.

Some of this "big-brother" stuff reminds me of the story of the guy who invented traffic radar (forget his name, but he's a Brit)...he ended up getting a speeding ticket at the hands of his own invention!

Something kind of similar...

One of our freeways here in Toronto is monitored by camera, and a guy was hauling his car to a show on a trailer and the car on the trailer received a notice for the toll highway. He fought it and was successful.

Lesson learned for those up here, and anywhere else where similar highways exist, cover up the licence plate on the trailered vehicle before going on the freeway - unless you want an extra ticket in the mail.

His name was Gatso

Actually, although the the first use of these cameras was in the UK, the inventor is a Belgian. Maurice Gatsonides is an accomplished (retired) racing driver, and the cameras are called "Gatso"s, after him.

My grandfather received a ticket in the mail from another state after he had been dead for 30 years. When my father opened the ticket, he recognized the personalized license plate as one that his father had used many years earlier. It seems that when my father was settling the estate, he told the junk man that if he would clean out the shed he could have any of the contents he wanted. Apparently this old license tag found it's way onto another vehicle in another state, and we would never have known about it if the plate's new owner had behaved. Dad wrote letters to the municipality that issued the ticket, and the Kansas Department of Revenue to resolve the matter. Moral of the story: keep track of your old tags!