GILURDS TRANSPORT
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Gillards Transport Is firmly rooted in agriculture. Its depot is in the farmyard of Lyng Farm and sister company GIBards Farms still works 500 acres In the area, growing sugar beet for the
British Sugar factory at Kidderminster as well as cereals and pulses. Under a contract with Trident Feeds, the animal feed arm of British Sugar, Gillards hauls beet to the processing plant and brings back pelleted feed to a warehouse and bagging plant at Lyng Farm. From here it's distributed to farms and feed merchants throughout Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.
Although the season for sugar beet processing only runs from October to January, its distribution is a year-round job. But Gillards only spends about 10% of its time hauling agricultural produce. The company has carved out a niche in the area for Special Types work, specialising In very large chunks of pre-cast concrete. Its main customers in this sector are Tarmac Precast Concrete, just down the road at Taunton, and Tarmac Topfloon which produces concrete hollow-core flooring at a factory in Chichester, where five of Gillards vehicles are based.
The Taunton factory produces large castings such as culverts, buildings and beams. "We do a lot of abnormal loads from there," says Gillards' general manager Roger Hutchings. "We run a few vehicles on STGO Cat 2 because they produce concrete lumps up to 50 or 60 tonnes." The company runs five Volvo FH12 6x2s for this works, hauling 12m and 13.6m extendible trailers and multi-axle step-frames, A major contract resulted from the number of new prisons being built around the country. Pre-cast concrete four-cell units, called quads, are produced at the Taunton factory; they weigh 45 tonnes apiece and are carried to destinations all over the country.
Another Gillards speciality is bogie loads; It recently used this method to deliver beams up to 40m long for the A303 improvement scheme near Exeter. "We take the tractor and four-axle steerable bogie up to the factory," says Hutchings. "It is then unhitched and the rear of the beam, within about three metres of the end, is placed on the bogie. It's then chained down and the front of the beam is placed on a bolster which sits on the tractive unit's fifth wheel. The bogie is locked up straight and then you have a lorry with the load forming part of the vehicle."
The same system was used to deliver a 66x5m steel footbridge from Littlehampton to London Docklands. This kind of work demands exceptional drivers. "Drivers are moved up from general work to the extender trailer work which Is 18m," says Hutchings. "Once they get used to that they are promoted to the heavy haulage division as vacancies come up. The money's a little bit better and there's always some who are keen to do it."
The driver famine and the nature of the work mean that Gillards occasionally has to use agency drivers. The skills shortage is not helped by the proximity of softer driving jobs, "We're near the M5 and every junction
between Weston-super Mare and Wellington has got a supermarket warehouse on it and they are all employing what seems to be between 70-80 drivers apiece," says Hutchings. "It's a nice clean collar-and-tie job. We are a flat haulier so we have to do a little roping and sheeting in the winter and it's not such a glamorous side of the business.
"We find we have to pay more now to keep the drivers with us rather than them going off and getting into a clean cab on a supermarket lorry," he adds. Gillards has used its rural location to build a solid customer base by offering a specialised service combined with its general haulage and agricultural work. Hutchings explains: "We like being rural. There is not a great number of customers down here such as there would be In a city environment, but there are not many hauliers either."