Pieter Groenendijk
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Mr Groenendijk is the secretary-general of the International Road Transport Union (or as Harold Russett described him, the Freddie Plasket of the IRU). He has been secretary general of the IRU, an "employers' organisation", since 1960. The organisation has consultative status in the United Nations and the Council of Europe, and is represented in 50 countries.
Mr Groenendijk delivered the heaviest speech of the week and was perhaps not an ideal conference opener. That is not to say that his paper — Future transport trends in Europe — was not an interesting one. It was packed with facts, figures, opinions and forecasts (with a little bit of history thrown in for good measure), although without written copies of the speech to take away with them, delegates must have had difficulty in absorbing the barrage of words that Mr Groenendijk recited. (The RHA should, I think, supply delegates with copies of all conference speeches so that they can be filed and referred to at a later and, possibly, more appropriate time.) Some of the assembly must have been satisfied to hear Mr Groenendijk speak unenthusiastically about rail transport.
"The age of the train is long past, at least as far as the carriage of freight is concerned, although that is not to say that it has no role at all, particularly in relation to combined rail/road traffic and in the carriage of certain bulk products over adequate distances. There seems little doubt that combined rail-road traffic will continue to grow but to a limited extent, and that some of its traffic will, in fact, have been transferred from pure rail traffic to the combined form, hence a partial gain to road transport at either end of the rail stretch."
Pieter Groenendijk's long paper/speech prompted comments from the floor. Ex-RHA chairman, John Silbermann (from the Brent Group of companies) talked about the seemingly endless problem for hauliers of public acceptability, and asked what is the IRU going to improve the unpopular image of the haulage operator?
Not enough, was Mr Groenendijk's reply in a nutshell.
Left: Pieter Groenendijk of the MU.