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ilgei Shepherd, transport manager with Edgar Shepherd of Darlington, County Durham spends his week mucking in where needed.
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• If you would like to feature in Working Week please fax your details to features )(liter Patric Cunnane or Micky Clarke an 020 8652 8912 or phone 020 8652 3678.
MONDAY
Despite my best efforts to plan, today is always a nightmare of a day: something always goes wrong. This time a driver is two-and-ahalf hours late, because he's been to the doctor. Fortunately the customer, based in Hull, doesn't mind waiting for his load of sawdust. Spend the rest of the day organising where our 115 trailers and 20 artics, mainly Oafs plated at 32 and 36 tonnes, are collecting loads of sawdust, bark and woodchip from customers in Newcastle, Hull and Leeds for factories and processing plants in Birmingham, Norwich and Felixstowe during the rest of the week.
TUESDAY
Arrive early for our usual daily meeting with brother Simon and father Edgar. We're a real family-run business, with Simon organising the processing of sawdust and shavings and Edgar keeping an eye on the overall running of things. He's good at delegating but likes to know what's going on. After this I roll my sleeves up to help load a 44-tonne tipping trailer with bark. This is destined for a processing plant in Norwich where it will be regraded and then sold on to garden centres. Ring round all of our 20 drivers just after 09:00hrs. By now they've completed their first tip so I ask them what time they'll be back and give them their instructions for their next jobs. One artic wagon is driving to Stafford to pick up a new tipping trailer for carrying 18-20 tonnes of sawdust.
WEDNESDAY
I usually spend today visiting existing customers to iron out any problems and chase new business with potential orients. So drive up to Leeds to visit a potential client. Hooray—win the business, which may mean we have to buy a new vehicle later in the year. The work starts next week, taking woodchip from a Leeds factory to a chipboard manufacturer in Hexham.
THURSDAY
Organise servicing for some of the artics with our local Scania dealer, Union Trucks at Darlington, who give us an excellent service. On a Saturday recently we had a vehicle with an air leak which caused the brakes to lock. All our four fitters had gone home but Union Trucks sent someone out and the vehicle was back on th( road in 45 minutes.
Later on we're a driver short and luckily I have my Class 1so I jump in a Daf 85 and start a collection of sawdust from mills in the North-East. We've got some pretty specialised kit for carrying sawdust, including an 120m3 Doll Combi semi-trailer with moving floor. The point of this is that it can discharge a load of woodchip in eight to 10 minutes, compared with an hour and a half in a curtainsider.
All in all it means we can get round more mills in a much quicker time!
FRIDAY
Begin the day by ringing round our customers who supply sawdust, shavings and bark and check their vehicle requirements for next week. Then start organising which trailers need to be loaded with which product for Monday morning. We try to do the loading on a Friday but employ a fork-lift truck driver and a loading shovel driver on a Saturday to do the bulk orders we haven't managed to get done. Like to get away by the early evening to get a few pints in at the local pub...