AT THE HEART OF THE ROAD TRANSPORT INDUSTRY.

Call our Sales Team on 0208 912 2120

WHEELING THE OIL

22nd September 1961
Page 77
Page 77, 22nd September 1961 — WHEELING THE OIL
Close
Noticed an error?
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.

Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

WHOEVER it may have been, credit is due to the man who originally coined the definition of the ideal haulier as the one .vho delivers the right goods to the right place at the right time—and, it is usually added, at the right price. The exact provenance of the phrase has now been lost. No doubt it turned up somewhere during the varied deliberations of the Royal Commission on Transport more than 30 years ago; but it may even then have been in the process of becoming hackneyed. From an epigram it declined rapidly into the c1ich6 of the afterdinner speaker.

It was strikingly apt as a motto in the early days of road transport, before there was any pretence of providing an organized service. To the trader who had been brought ip with the railways it must have been an experience like :omething out of The Arabian Nights Enter:aintnentsto be able to clap his hands and almost at once find a vehicle waiting outside his door ready to do his bidding. Much later the phrase did further duty as a yardstick for condemning the nationalized road transport undertaking that allegedly so often failed to provide what the customer wanted.

Nowadays the picture that the phrase calls up is perhaps a little faded. More and more operators provide a regular service, within the framework of which vehicle, time, place and price are taken for granted. More often than not, the operator cannot be held responsible on those occasions when the ideal is not attained.

IF the right place happens to be the dockside. or business premises in the congested centre of a large town where there are stern injunctions against parking or loading and unloading, the right vehicle with the right traffic may still not be able to carry out its function. Worse still, thanks to some skilful and unremitting propaganda, the public, or a section of the public, are coming to the opinion that certain vehicles (and especially those carrying abnormal indivisible loads) are always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the manufacturer of the load would have been far better occupied in making something quite different in another place for another customer.

As for the right place. . . .

Overtones and echoes from the past lend emphasis to the phrase when it turns up a little unexpectedly in the recent paper on oil distribution read by Mr. Christopher T. Brunner, director of Shell-Mex and B.P., Ltd., at the annnal meeting of the British Association (summarized in the September 8 issue of The Commercial Motor). As on other occasions, he has perhaps given the words a new lease of life, for although there can hardly be a business more highly organized than that of fuel distribution, they nevertheless exactly suit his theme.

Mr. Brunner draws attention to the curious fact that, although there is much talk about improving productivity in manufacturing industries, little attention seems to be paid to the service industries that now employ 42 per cent, of the total working population. The implied assumption, he says, is that the scope for greater efficiency is more limited, and the need less urgent. He uses the distribution system of his own company as an example to prove the assumption both wrong and dangerous.

Oil is distributed in Britain by barge, by road tanker, by the complete train load and by pipeline. There are almost inevitably stages in the chain of distribution. The choice of the location for each stage, and of the kind of transport to be used to and from the location, must be made so as to give the most intensive use of the available resources. Mistakes may prove expensive.

Although he is mainly concerned with one very specialized traffic, Mr. Brunner makes remarkably clear the problem of goods transport in general. Nearly always there is a large concentration of traffic, whether it be at a factory or a mine or a refinery, and the aim is to disperse the goods over a wide area to a variety of destinations. Where more than one stage is required, the practice is to break the traffic into smaller lots at each stage.

Even the apparent exceptions serve to illustrate the rule. Traffic offered in very small quantities has to be bulked with other goods, as in the case of the post office or the express carrier, before the process of distribution can begin; and the transport of the abnormal indivisible load shows what elaborate steps must be taken when a consignment cannot be subdivided to fit into the normal pattern of the vehicles that have to carry it.

MR. BRUNNER forecasts the increasing use of pipelines for oil distribution, but also makes plain that there will probably always be an extensive need for road tanker vehicles. Operators need not feel, therefore, that the oil companies are abandoning them. The bond between the two interests is naturally strong. Although there may be a multitude of uses for oil products, their use as fuel for road vehicles remains of cardinal importance. As a result, the oil companies have been forced to interest themselves in the problem of roads, on the subject of which, in fact, Mr. Brunner is internationally acknowledged as an expert.

It might be interesting to speculate what might have happened if it had been found—or if it should be discovered in the future—that trains really run best on liquid fuel and cars and lorries on something different.

APART from speculation, road users have grown accustomed to thinking that the oil companies are on their side. By turning to the use of pipelines, the companies might seem to be biting the hand that feeds them. The railways must often have felt like this when a customer who had built up his trade on the permanent way decided to turn to road transport, and possibly even moved his premises to a place where there was no adequate rail service. This rigidity in the face . of changing circumstances is in short the tragedy of the railways. Like the lady who took her harp to the party, they are left with a large and probably expensive piece of equipment for which there is no demand.

The problem of the road tanker operator is not of these dimensions. When he comes to the point of buying a new vehicle, he has to look ahead for a few years to decide whether the expenditure is justifiable. He would surely be aware of any plan to build a pipeline that in due course would make his vehicle superfluous. He has always accepted the impermanence of traffic, and has not fallen into the error sometimes found among the champions of the railways that they have a prescriptive right to certain types of operation. If the traffic he has been accustomed to carry is swallowed up by a pipeline, tankers are needed for many other products, including some that have not previously been carried by this means.


comments powered by Disqus