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Horse and cart ideas
Page 82
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ONE OF THE greatest boons to hit the road transport scene in its 300-year or so history was the advent of articulation. It started with the horse-drawn vehicles and percolated through to the motor vehicle during the 1920s — unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons.
The horse could not, quite obviously, carry anything like the load that it could pull and, when the early transport vehicles were beginning to replace the horse in the everyday hurly-burly of transport, the situation was precisely the same.
We know now that it is possible to build rigid vehicles that will quite successfully equal the articulated vehicle's legal payload allowance and so one sometimes wonders why our legislators seem to refuse to recognise just how much they are hogtying the industry with the restrictive regulations placed on -construction" of vehicles. Why cannot they be eased or in some way substituted with slightly more stringent "use" regulations?
If that situation were to arise, would the enterprise of the haulier very quickly bring forth numerous special configurations of vehicle designed to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of the movement of goods by road? Or do you think that we would still be lumbered with the staid, oldfashioned outlooks that are currently slowing the introduction of such badly needed advancements as air suspension, automatic transmission, retarders and load-handling equipment for instance?
Numerous vehicle improvements — invented admittedly by persons more intent on making a fortune than improving the lot of the long-suffering public — but which nevertheless could have had great bearing on the economics 01 road haulage, have hardly seen the light of day because of a lack of interest shown by the industry.
Yet it is very true that there is little that is completely new and, as one gets older one sees many things that first appeared in the days of one's youth rehashed and presented as new ideas. The reluctance of the haulage industry however to accept the challenge of new ideas has a stifling effect on the manufacturing industry's willingness to take up changes of approach put forward by the intrepid inventor, and so the ring has no end.
If you feel your haulier's pride pricked by my comments, just reflect on how far we have come in the last ten years since our American cousins forced the issue of containerisation onto a reluctant world of shipping. That industry had gone on having cargoes virtually manhandled on and off its vessels, while the said vessels — which like all other means of transport only make money when on the move — laid at the wharfside eating off their heads.
Then look at our own operations and see just how much of our working days are taken up with our capital equipment standing idle while loading and unloading.
Many firms I know have taken to the new technology of the demountable bodywork of the container like a duck to water but there are still literally • thousands of the transport industry's old favourite ''the sheeted flat" around, the concept of which dates back to medieval times.
If our Construction and Use Regulations were revised in such a way that we may take fuller advantage of increased unladen weight imposed by improved handling systems, I wonder if the industry would respond by improving the han dling and turnround proced ures? Or would we see the oldfashioned idea of cramming the greatest possible payload on the lightest possible vehicle, again forcing improved technology into the background?
And is it true that if the regulations suddenly permitted vehicles to operate at a slightly longer overall length in an attempt to make it possible to incorporate more suitable vehicle design, operators would simply lengthen the bodywork in order that greater load capacity could be obtained? However much we the operators shy away from those sentiments, I am afraid that they are definitely the impression given by our attitudes in years gone by.
There are more efficient ways to make money out of haulage than simply by carrying the greatest possible load wherever you are on the move. One of those is to be on the move with a payload for the greatest possible portion of your working day. Waiting about for fork-lift trucks to load you, for instance, can be avoided by having your own self-loading crane.
Such equipment can quickly pay for itself by improving your turnround times, so that in some cases where it took a whole day to complete a movement, it may be possible to do two or two and a half such movements in the same time. So where a 24tonner, for instance, loses one ton of payload by having a crane fitted, its daily throughput could be increased by as much as one and a half times its remaining payload.
In that way we would see a six-wheeler which without a crane may carry, say. 16 tons of payload and take, say, two hours to load and one hour to unload, having a potential of seven hours per day of actual rolling time. Fitting what would be a very heavy crane weighing a ton would reduce the payload potential to 15 tons but also reduce loading and offloading time to 30 mins each, so incrashing the available running time to nine whole hours.
If we reckon that each running hour gives us, say, 30 miles, we see the ton-mile potential of the first vehicle as 3,360 per day while the second vehicle, despite its lower pay load, musters a potential of 4,050 ton-miles per day.
Only when the industry as a whole takes the time to look
critically at what end results it is trying to achieve and then, sets down in a locical manner the potential of various methods for setting those results, can it hope to set its course with any degree of accuracy.
We have definitely got to start by having an open mind towards the many good, and bad, ideas that come from the inventors and to evaluate them properly and fairly without loading the results of those evaluations with pre-conceived dogma.