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CM journalists past and present consider the landmark issues that

have occurred during their tour of duty and find that some things never change.

ALAN MILLAR (left), CM reporter and later news editor from 1978 to 1986, looks back to when two of the industry's most famous white elephants— Leyland and NFC—suffered two very different fates. And nobody outside Cumbria had even heard of Eddie Stobart!

It is only when you draw breath, take stock and think back that you realise how much the road transport scene has changed even over the past 20 years. In 1979, the country's largest haulage group was nationalised and no one could imagine who would be crazy enough to buy it. The maximum gross operating weight was 32.5 tonnes and seemed held down permanently by political opposition to heavier lorries. It was still considered "patriotic" to buy British trucks. Wage rates for drivers were determined by national negotiations. And few people seemed to have heard of Eddie Stobart.

Yes, that was as recent as 1979. But in the next seven years, when I tried to keep tabs on the developments of most interest, the industry was changing steadily.

Strike

The Conservatives had swept to power, partly on a wave of public dissatisfaction with an Industrial relations scene that had seen the year dawn with a national haulage drivers' strike, and had served notice that they would sell off the National Freight Corporation.

NFC was a grand collection of the best known names in the business, such as British Road Services, National Carriers, Pickfords, Roadline and some respected regional and specialist companies.

But it was a financial nightmare, which seemed too big for anyone to swallow. We certainly could not find anyone jumping up with glee at the prospect of taking it off the state's hands. We speculated about cheeky Australian upstart TNT, but it was uncannily quiet on the subject.

Yet we were summoned one afternoon to a London hotel to be briefed by the very people hindsight tells us were the obvious buyers from the outset: chief executive Peter Thompson and his managers. They were prepared to go to the banks for the funds needed to sell NFC to a consortium of managers and employees.

The unions, bitterly opposed to privatisation, advised their members to steer clear, but the buyout went through and rode on an upward curve of ever dizzier financial success.

Shares

The many employees who bought shares soon saw their investments rocket and the company's annual meetings were a huge, happy, family party—save for some in the parcels companies who saw their jobs disappear as the group began investing overseas.

The quest for heavier lorry weights was long and difficult, with the industry's lobbyists joining the far higher number of groups ranged against them to give evidence to the Department of Transport inquiry chaired by the late Sir Arthur Armitage. He recommended measures to soften the blow of an increase, and the 38-tonne limit for artics came in during 1983.

The British truck manufacturing Industry shrank and edged increasingly into foreign hands. USowned Dodge was sold first to Peugeot, then to fellow French maker Renault. American-owned Seddon Atkinson passed into unexpected Spanish ownership, while poor old Leyland—political football and starved of investment—steadily shut plants, axed old names like AEC and Guy and was earmarked for a takeover dressed up as a joint venture with Daf. General Motors closed Bedford and Ford sold control of its British truck building to Ivaco.

All the while, an obscure haulier from Carlisle called Eddie Stobart was getting bigger. Eventually we took notice.

IAIN SHERRIFF MBE, CM's editor from 1976 to 1985, looks back at what has been happening since the first copy of CM hit the streets in 1905. Hauliers moaning about today's "brave new world" might like to stop and think about what they have left behind...

Imagine the world of road haulage without tachographs, drivers' hours regulations, vehicle inspectors, 0-licences, rate cutting and the plethora of statutes that attach themselves to a haulage business today.

There was such a time! When the first issue of Commercial Motor was published on Friday io March 1905, road transport was starting a journey into the unknown. But it grew steadily and eventually overtook horse-drawn transport.

It was after the 1914-18 war that road transport became a major force as former members of the Royal Army Service Corps put their training to good use and took to the road. Some went tramping on local work, others became the first trunkers. All seemed well until the bankruptcies began to emerge. The government stepped in and introduced the first form of Carrier's Licensing.

All an applicant had to do was to show that he had work for his vehicle. But, as the system evolved, he also had to produce evidence from his prospective customer. The A-Carriers Licence came into being.

Roast

Applications did not go unchallenged. Other operators were entitled to object on the grounds that they were able to produce the service, resulting in a dripping roast for lawyers.

All now seemed set fair until, tha i is, an applicant appealed against the refusal of a general licence. A great British compromise was reached—the B. licence—whichrestricted the holder to carry only specified goods on behalf of a named customer within a specified radius of base. Surely that would satisfy all concerned. But not a bit of it. The specified customers decided that the traffic carried on their behalf could be transported more economically and securely using their own vehicles. The C-licence arrived. It was automatically granted and there was no provision for objectors.

One exception

That system appeared to work to the satisfaction of everyone with one exception, Barbara Castle, the minister for transport in 1966. That was when she introduced a parliamentary Bill to scrap the entire system and replace it with the Operator's Licence. The Tories

mounted a campaign, led by Peter Walker and Michael Heseltine, illustrated with a cartoon of a seedy gent and captioned Let's Kill Transport Bill. It was all good knockabout fun—but the bill survived.

Castle made no excuses for introducing what she described as competition to the haulage industry and absolved herself of any failures that resulted. "I am sure that it will find its own level," she said. The requirement to prove need was abolished. The new criteria were to show that the applicant had adequate maintenance facilities, was financially viable and did not have a criminal record. The police, trade unions and local authorities were those with the right to object.

This form is almost a complete U-turn to the situation in 1919.

What will the new century bring? Who knows? I suspect not even John Prescott has the faintest idea.

DAVID WILCOX was a CM news reporter then features editor from 1978 to 1986. He looks back over a period in which the buzzword was "distribution", when spies in the cab were getting drivers hot under the collar and when road haulage was in crisis. What's new?

Life seemed so simple when homed Commercial Meter It was December 1978 and I can vividly recall being shown to a desk on which there was an old typewriter and a viciouslooking spike for filing source material. The most complicated bit was working out which way up the carbon paper went.

Fortunately, the industry I was covering was not much more sophisticated itself. A glance back at copies of the magazine from that era shows picture after picture of brave little tractors with all of 250bhp pulling barn-like trailers through the gloom of black-and-white photographs. What's missing?

For a start, all the trailers have tandem axles. And no sideguards or spray suppression. And where are the roof-mounted air kits? Drivers were using logbooks, drawing outlines of castle battlements as the day went by. Tachographs did not enrich our lives until 1982 and we would have to struggle on for a further 10 years without speed-limiters.

But the real changes since then have been in the structure of the road freight industry. In those days there was a good chance that the name on the side of a truck was the same as the name of the company that had bought it, with the tractor unlikely to have cost much more than 00,000. The big companies wrote a cheque while the owner-driver signed the hire-purchase forms and bought his truck on the never-never. Ownership—no matter how long it took—was still considered important.

Newfangled

I recall there was something called contract hire, but less than 10% of trucks were operated by this newfangled scheme in the early eighties. Nearly 20 years later, 45% of UK truck sales are part of a contract hire package. Moreover, the UK is acknowledged as setting the pace in Europe for marketing contract hire, guaranteed buyback deals and all the other financial shenanigans that are now commonplace.

In the late seventies, we wrote about hauliers and transport companies. The posh ones did warehousing and distribution. Nobody was offering supply chain solutions. No humble Ford 0-series ever aspired to deliver total quality logistics.

Third-party carriers (remember SPD?) offering shared-user services became unfashionable, to be replaced by dedicated, long

term contracts. Much of the change was driven by the retailing revolution, with the big supermarkets and store chains setting up RDCs and eliminating the queues of 16-tonners at goods inwards doors behind shops throughout Britain. It was during, the eighties that the big retail chains emerged as the movers and shakers in the road transport industry.

The traditional power bases like the brewery and oil company fleets found that even they were not insulated from the cold winds of change as the terms "contracted-out" and "core business" echoed through their boardrooms.

We watched the rise of the parcels industry, growing off the trend for de-stocking, which itself was one of the classic reactions to the recession of 1980. Several years later it spawned the pallet consortium, the perfect product for its time, filling the gap that had opened up between dedicated distribution and parcels traffic, while feeding off an insatiable desire for next-day delivery.

But some things never change. The theme for the Road Haulage Association's 1980 conference was "Haulage in Crisis", and the delegates spent their time working out how to increase haulage rates. As they discussed reducing over-capacity in the industry by moth-balling vehicles they wondered what to do with the surplus of drivers. They also concluded that they could expect no help from the government of the day. "Helping the haulier is not a good political platform", was the thinking of the day.

One of the conference sessions was devoted to managing the arrival of tachographs. But a senior industry figure—who shall remain nameless—said that in five years fie 1985) "tachographs will be obsolete because we will have black-box-style flight recorders". I hope he wasn't holding his breath...

RON CATER, former assistant technical editor at CM, braved the elements between 1964 and 1971 to bring us roadtests when boys were men and men were "drivers". He looks back to a time when the M1 stopped at Watford Gap and the M6 at Cannock and when legislation finally began to leave its mark on the industry's tools of the trade.

The most powerful catalyst for change in the design and development of vehicles has always been government regulation. This has never been so pronounced as during the period when maximum train weights jumped eight "old" tons from 24 to 32, plating and testing became compulsory and drivers had to acquire a special driving licence. Type approval was at the time beginning to regularise vehicle design, and later in that tranche of regulation came the minimum bhp per gross ton requirement.

HGV drivers became licensed professionals, workshop foremen became fleet engineers and vehicle salesmen had to swat up on vehicle performance calculations as well as the standard colour ranges!

As weights increased and the road network produced legal workshift mileages unheard of in the late fifties, so the need for more powerful vehicles capable of sustained high-speed, and high train weights grew.

It was unusual in the early sixties to find a turbocharged diesel engine in a British truck and the answer to the hauliers' demands by engine makers was stretched versions of units which had been around for years. The results were constant failures and, in all but one make, rising fuel consumption.

This opened up the market to the foreign competition, notably the Swedes and Germans, both of whom had a great deal of experience in squeezing high outputs from relatively small volume engines by turbocharging. Operators who took the plunge and bought foreign moved into a previously unheard of phase of reliability and performance and the writing was on the wall for the British truck industry.

Weeded out

Plating and testing weeded out a lot of unsafe machinery which had plodded up and down the country without let or hindrance. The need to have correctly matched tyres instead of "round and rubber" (or sometimes just canvas), a handbrake that worked, lights that had bulbs in the sockets and mirrors properly secured in a usable position changed the face of many fleets. In private it was thought that the test changed the lot of the driver—and for the better.

Results of the first brake tests of vehicles in D

service were frightening and much midnight oil was burned finding ways to conform. The vacuum or servo brake system had finally met its Waterloo. The rush was also on to achieve a usable power-assisted handbrake, and parking brake and split circuit foundation brakes started to appear.

A new word appeared on the scene: training. It started with staff for the testing stations, then drivers and, by the end of the sixties, there was a full-blown transport training industry. The RTITB was formed to regulate the trainers. The whole industry was for me, after 28 years in various branches of it, changing more rapidly than had ever known.

Towards the end of my time at CM we were testing vehides of the future. Many of these produced performances that, six years before, were unheard of. The facilities for drivers were so different that they seemed unimportant if you had not experienced what had gone before. But to oldtime motormen a warm, dry cab with a seat that could be adjusted so that you could reach the pedals was heaven indeed.

BRIAN WEATHERLEY, Ms editor since 1989, bids farewell to the 20th century and wonders what the new one will bring. More endemic rate cutting? More closures? More taxation? Why should the future be any different from the present?

If you'd have told me 10 years ago that by the end of the century the nation's hauliers would be protesting in the streets, driving their trucks over to France at the weekend to fill them with diesel and re-registering their fleets in Holland I'd have laughed in your face. What? British hauliers actually doing something about their troubles instead of moaning? Aw, go on... But then I'd have also laughed if you'd have told me that

by 1999 we'd have 400hp tractors capable of returning more than 8mpg pulling 40 tonnes.

As we stagger into the next century are we finally witnessing the fightback from an industry that will not be pushed around any more by the Treasury? Or are the protests simply the last gasp of hundreds of small operators in their death throes? Not waving, but drowning".

Shake-out

The industry has been declining for the past 20 years and the great shake-out is by no means over. In 1978 the number of individual 0-licence holders was estimated at just under 100,000. Today the figure is closer to 63,000. The only thing that is different is that the government appears to have taken on the job of reducing over-capacity itself where before it used to leave it to the market. I suppose that is progress for you Suddenly the spotlight has been on the trade associations, which for years have bumbled along happily. They have had to face indignant members demanding to know what they are doing while they are dying. Torn between storming the ramparts or playing it safe they have ended up wandering along the sidelines as a new crop of pressure groups has sprung up, ensuring the industry fragments further.

Two years ago a senior RHA board member asked me in a somewhat bemused tone: "What do you think we should do with this Trans-Action lot in Kent?"

You could always try joining them," I replied.

Meanwhile, the gap between the law-abiders and the law-breakers is as wide as ever. The microchip should have made it more difficult for the bad boys to beat the rap. Yet, despite all the talk about impounding, intelligence-based enforcement and targeting, we cannot rid ourselves of a cancer that continues to eat away at the industry and its reputation—what little it has. But then would it really pay to remove the bad boys? As one cynic suggested to CM, the last thing the government wants is for the cost of transport to go up.

Universal legal running is about the only thing that would ever raise rates, for a short while at least. After all, it is only by running bent that many operators stay in business.

Bottom line

Playing by the rules will not guarantee survival. To make it in business today you have to cut costs and keep on cutting as that will be the only way to make more profit out of the same revenue. The bottom line is that this industry is the classic example of the pure, naked, Thatcherite, dog-eatdog free market .

And do you know what's funny? Nothing is going to change. In 2099 when the editor of CM writes his end-of-century editorial he will probably say the same. Assuming the industry hasn't been taken over by Eddie Stobart. And to those of us who didn't completely blot our copybook, the great Traffic Commissioner in the sky will look down and say: You know, it was the same in my day..."