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Cold comfort
Page 68
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On a cold, frosty morning Brian Lee muses about the shortcomings of HGV batteries, weighbridges and congestion.
Since the introduction of a diesel engine that can withstand old-fashioned northern hemisphere winters, nearly 20 years of global warming have made conditions milder. So why are HGV batteries still found wanting when the temperature falls below 4°C?
My slumbers have been disturbed on a number of occasions recently by drivers phoning to say that they've had to call out the Helpline to breathe life into the battery and fire up the vehicle. The policy at Allan Morris is that all our units are contract hired on a four-year replacement scheme, so we maintain a modern fleet with so-called modern batteries.
When.at a civilised hour.! attend the call-out with the manufacturer's local rep the questions are always the same:"Did the driver have the interior light on for more than five minutes? The radio for more than 10 minutes? Was the TV used for any more than a few minutes?" Answer "yes" to any of these questions, the response is usually."Well. what do you expect?"
It's hard taking this from dealers who leave their air-conditioned offices and go to homes packed with electrical luxuries while those who provide the means to support this lavish life style freeze in a lonely lay-by, terrifled of having anything remotely electrical on for fear of not being able to start their vehicle the following morning. And it's not that long ago that the same dealers were supplying sleeper cabs with night heaters as optional extras at inflated prices.
Who's reasonable?
The minutes of a meeting between quarry operators, hauliers and the Health and Safety Executive recently landed on my desk.The conclusion of the meeting was a statement from the HSE that 'reasonableness' should be applied .That got me thinking of a tussle we North Wales tipper hauliers had years ago when the Ministry installed two dynamic axle weighbridges between the quarries and their customers.
The authorities had a field-day fining operators on axle overweights left, right and centre. So to try and level the playing field we asked the quarries if they would install dynamic axle weighbridges. "No," they replied, as Trading Standards wouldn't recognise a sale from anything other than a plate weighbridge.
We asked if we could weigh each axle prior to departure. to ensure that the axle weights would be spot on,"No",they replied,"it would cause congestion 'We asked if we could instruct the loading shovel driver where to place the load, thereby guesstimating our axle weight."No,loading shovel drivers are a law unto themselves," came the response.
At this point the Road Haulage Association stepped in and pressed for consignor hability.And that was when the quarry owners had the 'fair-and-reasonable' suggestion consigned to the bin.
So what happened as soon as the bridges opened? Alternative routes were found and tippers could be found fording streams, crossing old ladies' gardens and following bridle paths to escape the cash cow of dynamic bridges. It's only human nature.
Follow that leviathan!
Finally, what do you do during those few precious hours when you aren't keeping Britain's industry moving? Bob and Richard, two of our drivers, spent last weekend in Bob's 20-year-old VW Jetta with 180,000 miles on the clock, following a 180-tonne leviathan through the highways and byways of north-east Wales.
And while everybody in northeast Wales was hopping mad with the congestion created by the mammoth rig and its outriders, the boys spectacularly failed to keep up with it, finally tracking it down only as dusk closed in. But their secret's safe with me... •