IN THIS FEATURE 40 years on the job Early examples Gaining car-like luxuries Looks and practicality Here to stay

Customisers honed in quickly on the Transit in the '70s heyday of the pastime. The large expanses of sheet steel made perfect blank canvasses for their lurid paint jobs that usually involved naked females in compromising male fantasy poses. Inside, the cargo areas were converted button draylon 'shag pads' complete with TV and bar. Its relative speed, capaciousness and invisibility has also made it the get-away vehicle of choice on many a 'blag'.

On TV in the '70s The Sweeney captured the Transit's position perfectly as a vehicle for the criminal element; Regan and Carter would throw burly men in stocking masks and army fatigues across the bonnet of a Tranny on an almost weekly basis. It became as much of a cliché of the show as the brown Ford Granada, screeching Jaguars and kipper ties.

Transits did service in most unlikely places, including hundreds of feet underground

And if the bad men with crow bars and sawn-off shot guns weren't driving a Transit then like as not they were trying to rob the loot from one in a wages snatch. Many more were, and are, the basis for armoured security vehicles. On a lighter note the Transit has proved an ideal base for motor homes (usually painted beige) and, if you produced a large family, the crew bus version (with windows and seats) made an ideal if slightly austere MPV, or what we used to call a mini bus.