In the early 80's at Wittering, I was locking up the APU engine test bed after civvy contractors had been doing some alterations. I spotted what turned out to be blue asbestos coming out of the walls and the test bed was out of action for a couple of months. We then had to take our APU's to Gutersloh to use their test bed. We would take across 6 engines at a time and spend a week there.
The airman's transit accommodation was dire but luckily in short supply so the drill was to phone the guardroom and ask if they had any transit beds. You did this several times until the guardroom staff said there were no transit beds. You then presented to the OO who gave you a chit for a hotel in Gutersloh town. You checked out the next morning and repeated the same performance the next day. If you were lucky, you could spend the whole det in a hotel but once you were in transit, you stayed there
We used to get 6 Harrier GTS/APU's into a sherpa for the drive over. Once we got the engines serviceable, we crammed a carton of duty free cigs into each intake, boxed them up and sent them back to Wittering through the stores system (1). We then loaded up the empty sherpa with crates of Wobbly/DAB/Bitburger etc for the trip home. Happy days indeed.
(1) The engines always travelled back to wittering under a u/s F731 so there was no danger of them getting fitted to an aircraft with 200 cigs in the intake, not that you could miss the carton of cigs once the intake blank was removed.