I Meet Some Kentucky Hauliers
Page 67
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kFTER the comparative formality of Washington, and my examination of— among other matters—the structure of the American Trucking Associations Inc., it was quite refreshing to get "out into the country ". After a couple of tys in Colombus, Indiana, with the Cummins Engine Co. (an article about which veered in "The Commercial Motor ", February 21, 1964), I spent an unscheduled ut pleasant day in the Blue Grass country of Kentucky lunching in Louisville with le members of the Kentucky Motor Transport Association, Inc., one of the 50 State isociations who are the constituents of the A.T.A.
Now Louisville may well be membered in this country mainly :cause it is the home town of that somehat verbose gentleman Cassius Clay, 11 its citizens are not, I am glad to port, in the same mould. My lunch ith 100 or so Kentucky hauliers was te of the social highspots of my tour. I suppose it is the same the world over, it I found here (as I do in this country) at the friendly informality of " trea " :fictions is often a happy change from e " best-behaviour " H.Q. functions.
I found a slight moral, however. When Id that the membership of the Kencky M.T.A. was only some 250 commies—and seeing well over 100 faces ,und the lunc!von room -1 must have oked surprised because Paul Young, anaging director of the Kentucky sociation, aclually felt impelled to point it that they "hadn't got such a good rn-out as usual for the monthly lunch cause of the heavy snowfalls ". I can
t ever imagine nearly half of the embers of any British association gularly turning up to monthly meetings, en with lunch as an inducement.
ontrols 1,500 Vehicles
One of the hauliers I met there was W. (Bud) Huber, president of Huber id Huber Motor Express Inc., of-Louis11e. A quick visit to Bud's H.Q. and a at with him produced. several note)rthy points.
Bud, still in his early thirties, controls is vast 1,500-vehicle concern founded his late father with a deceptively sual touch, because there is certainly :thing casual about this company. With misville roughly in the centre of the crating area, Huber and Huber radiate rrthwards to Chicago, southwards to .lanta, as far east as St. Louis, Missouri, d out to Charleston, West Virginia. )righly speaking it is a 600 squ..,re mile ▪ The longest route operated solely
Huber and Huber (by that I mean thout interworking with another erator) is the service from Chicago to lanta, which is operated by big" articued units carrying some 32 tons of :ight. The tractive units have tilt eper cabs.
So far as Bud is concerned "tilt cabs wonderful -• This was, incidentally,
an opinion I found to be generally held amongst American operators; nowhere did I find complaints (as are sometimes voiced in this country by operators who do net have such cabs) that tilt cabs tend to come loose on their mountings.
The Chicago-Atlanta run is 707 miles Long and the Huber and Huber vehicles, powered by Cummins 220 b.h.p. N,H.220 engines, complete it in 21 hours. The drivers of such outfits are paid $3.09 per hour with an additional 56 c. per hour on pension. Bud told me that his Lop line drivers earn up to $200 a week on this type of work. So far as the vehicles are concerned, he told me they all received maintenance checks at 3,000mile intervals. He expected to get between 80,000 and 100,000 miles t a year out of his smaller units (with a gross weight of some 22 tons) and 150,000 to 160,000 miles a year on his big, sleeper-cabbed articulated units. Normal mileage before a top overhaul of an engine is 235,000 300,000. Bud—as were many other American operators I spoke to—was not in the least surprised at the thought of million-mile vehicles. His attitude was that he would go looking for the dealer if his big vehicles did not all produce such mileages.
All the operations are controlled from the Louisville terminal. As each driver of a Huber and Huber vehicle reports to one of the company depots his arrival is reported back to H.Q. and he is then scheduled on from that depot. The system of operating involves an incredible (by British standards) interchange of semi-trailers, not just between units within the fleet, but between different operators_ Huber and Huber interchange trailers with no fewer than 700 operators in various parts of the United Statek. The point of this type of activity is that hauliers who are licensed to a certain route can, by changing trailers with hauliers at the terminal points, increase their range of operations through this interworking until they can in fact offer a complete State-wide service to their customers. It was also apparent that they controlled the movements of their semi-trailers much closer than is generally the case in this country. At the Louisville headquarters of Huber and Huber I saw a wall chart on which was recorded the location of every trailer in the fleet and every trailer belonging to an interworking operator whfch was at the moment behind a Huber and Huber tractor. They did not, so far as I could see, keep a record of their own trailers which were being hauled by other operators' tractive units, except to record that they were working outside the Huber network.
I was rather surprised when Bud told me that he only expected a five-year life from his trailers, which were all either van bodied or stakeand rack-sided trailers with a canvas tilt roof. He hoped to get eight to 10 years at least from his tractive units. On reflection, however. I recall several other operators in the U.S.A. and Canada referring to this fiveyear life for trailers. It did not seem to be a question of cost, because when the cost was converted into sterling, there seemed to be very little difference between the cost of a semi-trailer in this country and America. I was interested to note the considerable difference in fuel consumption that the very severe winters experienced in parts of the U.S.A. made. On the 707-mile Chicago-Atlanta route, Bud told me, average fuel consumption for the big units was 5-75 m.p.g. in winter, rising to 6-2 m.p.g. in summer, His inquiries and researches had shown that the difference was caused purely by the weather, the need for more tow gear work, cold starting and so on.
Bud, who has 10-speed Fuller Roadranger constant mesh gearboxes fitted to his big highway units, could see no need either for power steering or automatic transmission. He quite surprised me, however, as we were walking round his modern terminal, by announcing th, they had virtually done away with forklift trucks and with their continuous drag-line loading device whereby a continuous-moving belt pulled wheeled trucks around the loading deckuntil the freight could be off-loaded from them into the bays. Huber and Huber has also done away with pallets. For two reasons: (a) because they experienced too many claims for damage and (b) because they found that they always had to wait for a fork-lift truck to move the pallet. Now, Bud told me, he uses hand trucks for unloading and allocates, one man to one van semi-trailer, all the unloading being done with hand trucks with this one man. This, he told me, was undoubtedly the cheapest way to run his loading bank and it involved less man hours per vehicle. Quite a facer, I felt, as one has always looked upon America as the land of mechanized handling.