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TGB settlement
Page 17
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A SOUTH Yorkshire haulier's claim for damages against Primrose Holding subsidiary has been settled in the Sheffield Crown Court after a three-day hearing.
Haulage contractor Denis Gardner, of Harworth, near Bawtry had claimed damages of £21,000 plus interests and costs for the loss of use of a dropsided tipping trailer sent into TGB Motors (a Primrose subsidiary based at Clitheroe) for repair following an accident in January 1976.
However, settlement was reached for TGB to pay Mr Gardner £1,000 with the trailer being returned to him and with no order as to costs.
Mr Gardner who had estimated his loss of profit at £15,000 said he had been unable to continue with two contracts, the carriage of bulk salt to Telford and the movement of bauxite from the Midlands to Rotherham, as he had been unable to find a trailer compatible for both commodities for some time afterwards.
After repairs had been carried out, he saw the body being lifted. There was considerable shuddering and resistance and the sub-frame of the body bowed considerably.
Questioned by Eric Shannon for TGB, Mr Gardner agreed that in the year previous he had only made £8,000 profit when operating four vehicles.
He agreed that he had said that on each journey to Telford he would have been carrying 21 tons on the trailer but that invoices produced shared a lesser tonnage. Similiarly he had said the salt was carried at £2.60 per ton and the bauxite at £2.40 when invoices showed the rates were £2.50 and £2.25.
Evidence was given by the customers concerned that the salt traffic had been in the region of 60 to 100 tons a week whilst the bauxite had been on an ad hoc daily basis without there being a regular contract for a particular journey to be carried out six days a week.
Mr Shannon suggested that Mr Gardner appeared to have exagerated his claim in every detail. He said that the profit element in the claim was "pie in the sky" and maintained that the calculations were entirely fictional with every item being false.
James Holden, a haulage contractor of Darwen, Lancashire, said he had been the original owner of the trailer which had been built especially for him by Primrose.
Such a trailer relied purely on the sub frame for strength and when tipped the body had always bowed by four or five inches. To anyone not used to drop-sided tipping trailers such bowing would be worrying.
Consultant engineer John Nichol said that he had inspected the trailer in June 1976. He found that the chassis mainframe members and the subframe members were deformed where heat straightening and welding repair had been carried out.
The body and tipping ram had been poorly repaired. The structural strength was suspect and misalignment that he found could cause problems when tipping.
If the body was not square it would go up and down in jerks creating stresses that could turn the vehicle over. In his opinion the trailer was not fit at that stage to do the job that it was designed for.