All his own • • •
Page 34
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A haulier I met last week was most annoyed with owner-operators. One of these "upstarts" with a secondhand vehicle had undercut my friend's rate and made off with some of the traffic. After a little light refreshment, the haulier mellowed a little. "I suppose it happens all the time," he said.
A few minutes later he was positively beaming as he recalled for me a deal in which he had traded in six A tk insons — all six years old — against six new vehicles. "I got £650 for each of them," he boasted.
"What was the scrap value?" I queried.
"About £50 each, I suppose." "Why didn't you scrap them?" I asked naively.
Recovering from his faint, he weakly replied: "And lose 600 quid a time?"
"Who bought your old vehicles?"
"Some flaming owner-drivers,"he replied. And then the light dawned.
We did a sum. He would have "lost" £600 a vehicle if they had been scrapped. As it was, he estimated he was losing about £6 per hour profit because someone was using the vehicles to undercut his rates. Had he scrapped them, after 600 hours or ten 60-hour weeks, he would have saved the £600 and still had six vehicles working. Moreover, I understand his dealer would almost certainly have increased the discount on the new vehicles if there had been nothing to take back.
Still in doubt? Then try the third paragraph on page 46 of this issue. expensive to buy as a four-wheeled tramper. Still, MAN Concessionaires' Len Baxter tells me he's absolutely certain that the 32-ton drawbar layout is really going to take off in Britain over the next two years.
Farewell, PRTA
Weddings and wakes provoke reminiscence, and the reshufflings in the bus associations are a wedding and wake rolled into one. The Public Road Transport Association (nee PTA) breathed its last on November 14 and, after declaring its solvency, went into voluntary liquidation so that its members can instead join the new Confederation.
At the last PRTA dinner, on the same day, reminiscence was under standably strong and the event was supported by no fewer than 10 past chairmen, seven chairmen of Traffic Commissioners and a host of other transport notables, among them the veteran Lord "Bill" Black, one-time chairman of AEC and later Leyland Motor Corporation.