FURIOUS Ed Smy today relived his 24-hour "journey from hell" house move to Scotland after a catalogue of problems with a rented van.The 54-year-old hired a van from Kenning Car and Van Rental, of Duke Street, Ipswich, to move his belongings from his former north Suffolk home, in St Cross, near Bungay, to his new Scottish home, in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire.

FURIOUS Ed Smy today relived his 24-hour "journey from hell" house move to Scotland after a catalogue of problems with a rented van.

The 54-year-old hired a van from Kenning Car and Van Rental, of Duke Street, Ipswich, to move his belongings from his former north Suffolk home, in St Cross, near Bungay, to his new Scottish home, in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire.

The mammoth 410-mile journey, which would normally take around nine hours, took more than twice as long after Mr Smy said he experienced a catalogue of problems with his van.

After departing Suffolk at 9am and making a stop in Derby at 12.30pm on Friday , Mr Smy resumed his journey at 3.30pm to join the M6 motorway. He soon noticed something was wrong when his van would not exceed a speed of 30 miles per hour.

At 5.20pm, Mr Smy decided to pull off the M6 and call the telephone helpline number to get assistance from the vehicle makers, LDV Vans. Despite claiming he had being told an engineer would attend within an hour, he said no one arrived until 7.55pm.

When an engineer did arrive, Mr Smy said he told him he could not find anything wrong with the van and so he continued his journey.

Just four miles further up the motorway the van broke down again, at 8.10pm.

Once again, Mr Smy telephoned the helpline and was told someone would be there within an hour. Two hours later an engineer arrived, at 10.20pm, to find a bedraggled Mr Smy.

He said: "It was pouring down with ran, I was standing on the hard shoulder and lorries were flying past. It really was quite scary."

Mr Smy claims he was then told the van would be taken into a Manchester garage and be repaired immediately. They arrived, at 11pm, only to be told that the garage were "unable to fix vans" during the night.

An increasingly agitated Mr Smy – in an unfamiliar city with no hotel to go to – asked for a low-loader to tow him on the remainder of his journey to Scotland.

By 4am, Mr Smy was still waiting but there was no sign of a low loader.

He said: "The main line was "you will have to wait to contact Kenning in the morning"."

Eventually, he was told nothing was available and so a deflated Mr Smy decided to have a two-hour snooze in the van.

He woke to find that nothing had been sorted out so he telephoned another Kenning branch, in Manchester, when they opened at 8am.

Although they offered to send him another van, they said he would have to unload and repack all his belongings himself.

An amazed Mr Smy said: "I said 'you have got to be crazy'."

Finally, at 11am, after a heated discussion, an arrangement was made to tow an exhausted Mr Smy and his van to Scotland. He arrived at 4pm and finished unpacking at 5pm. Felixstowe-born Mr Smy was then finally able to join his wife Prentice, 40, and son, Alex, 14.

He said: "I feel absolutely shattered and so disillusioned."

A spokeswoman for Kennings said that Mr Smy was fully refunded and has been sent a letter of apology.

"We will be carrying out an investigation into our breakdown procedure to see why this happened," she said.