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c.p.p.
1995. "It's going very well," says Davies. We are 25% up on turnover since then—we could all do with more profit but we are reasonably happy."
New work has arrived since the buyout: Coal Products (CPL) is a new customer while an existing client, Castle Cement, has increased its business. Most encouragingly, perhaps, Ryan Transport managed to retain the deep mine work that had formerly been its by right when it was a Ryan Group subsidiary: this work was sold to Northern Strip Mining (NSM) which has not only continued to use Ryan Transport but expanded the work. The company has a distribution manager based at NSM's railhead at Crymych which handles 14,000 tonnes of coal a week.
The forced separation from the Ryan Group has had other advantages: "Formerly we were the transport ann of Ryan which just wanted vehicles to move its own coal. Now we are solely a transport company, we can expand," Davies explains. Plans include an increase in shipments of bulk coal through Cardiff port a special coking coal is imported from Virginia and Ryan is looking at a project to return aggregates to the US. The company also wants to acquire another haulier so it can diversify into general haulage and warehousing and not remain so dependent on bulk movements.
Not that Davies wants to move away from bulk—he looks forward to the opening of Cardiff's freighthead in 1998 and is quite happy to reduce the road-going mileage of his bulk loads: "In the future bulk hauliers could operate within a 30mile radius on the roads and do the rest by train."
Outside Tower Colliery a sign boldly proclaims that this is "the last deep mine in South Wales." And Davies, whose father and grandfather were miners, reckons there used to be 60. As recently as 1992. Ryan carried 100,000 tonnes of domestic coal—by last year this had fallen to 10,000 tonnes. Mining was never a pretty enterprise and their disappearance might please those who do not think there should be jobs in the countryside: "The valleys are greener and they look better without slag heaps," admits Davies. "but from a professional viewpoint we wish there were one or two more pits to take coal out of,"