VALICON TRANS LTD

02

What a haulier is selling

A vehicle leaves Slough on a route that is already committed, and the floor of that vehicle is finite. What is sold is space on that floor for the hours the route takes, and nothing more abstract. Once a route is planned, every further booking competes for the metres left on the same deck. The effect is that a consignment is slotted by the space it stands on and by the point the vehicle can still reach. Weight matters at the axle, though on most working days the floor fills before the plate does. Each of the eleven sections below follows from that one constraint.

03

A pallet is measured before it is weighed

A pallet is described by its base first, because the base is the part of it that stands on the deck. A standard UK base measures 1200 by 1000 millimetres, and a Euro base measures 1200 by 800. Height governs what can be stacked above the load, and mass governs where it sits over the axles, but neither changes the floor area it occupies. The effect is that two consignments of identical tonnage can consume very different amounts of a vehicle. Once the base area is known the booking follows arithmetic anyone can repeat, which is the arithmetic set out in section 08.

04

Groupage, and the wait built into it

A part consignment shares a deck with other people's freight, so it moves when a suitable vehicle is already going its way. The consignment waits for the vehicle; the vehicle is never held back for one consignment. Once a trunk vehicle is loaded and away, the next opportunity is the following departure and not an hour later. The effect is a wider delivery window than a dedicated load carries, at a share of the cost of the deck. Groupage suits freight that is durable, well built for handling, and honestly described on the consignment note.

05

The corridor the routes run along

The routes run east and west of Slough along the M4 corridor, taking in Langley, Iver, Colnbrook, Poyle, Uxbridge, Maidenhead, Reading and Bracknell. Distances there are short and the traffic is not, so a delivery window is governed by junction access and by very little else. Once the morning peak has drained the corridor moves reasonably, and it holds until the middle of the afternoon. By then a vehicle delayed on a single tail-lift delivery has lost the ground the rest of its drops depended on. The effect is that a run of a dozen or so drops is planned around access, and not around mileage.

06

Working the Heathrow perimeter

Delivery beside an airport is constrained before the vehicle arrives, because the perimeter roads carry restrictions an ordinary trading estate does not. Access to the cargo centres is booked, checked and timed, and a driver whose paperwork is incomplete is turned at the gate. Holding areas fill early in the day, so a vehicle stopped at one perimeter address is a vehicle late at the next four. The effect is that perimeter work is planned with a longer allowance than the same drop made three miles further out.

07

Three departures make the day

The working day is planned around three trunk departures, and each one serves ground the other two cannot reach in time.

07:00

The western leg — Maidenhead, Reading, Bracknell and the M4 junctions beyond them.

11:30

The perimeter and the estates — Colnbrook, Poyle, Langley and the Heathrow cargo centres.

16:00

The London trunk and the handover into the overnight pallet network.

A collection booked before the middle of the morning ordinarily makes the second departure of the same day. By then the western leg has gone, so a Reading or Bracknell drop booked after that hour becomes a next-day drop.

08

Deck footprint and floor space

The arithmetic below is the arithmetic the office works when a booking is measured, and every figure in it comes from the four fields. It describes floor area and it describes nothing else: it settles no price, reserves no slot, and says nothing about whether a vehicle is free on the day in question.

09

Why a slot is sometimes not achievable

Four ordinary things stop a slot being offered, and not one of them is unusual on a working day.

The first is deck space, where the departure the consignment needs is already loaded out to the floor.

The second is access, where the receiving point cannot take the vehicle class the consignment requires; a smaller vehicle then means a later departure.

The third is receiving hours, where a delivery point closing in the early afternoon is out of reach once a morning has run long.

The fourth is paperwork, where a consignment lacking a full address, a named contact or a description of the goods cannot be traced once it moves, so it is not loaded.

Once one of the four applies, the office offers the next departure that clears it and states which of the four it was.

10

Writing to the transport office

Bookings, rate enquiries and questions about a consignment already moving are handled by the transport office at Slough, which keeps them together against one reference.

VALICON TRANS LTD, 595 London Road, Slough, SL3 8QG, United Kingdom

Office line for booking and enquiry: transport@valicontrans.buzz

A written enquiry carrying the collection postcode, the delivery postcode, the number of pallets and the base size can be answered against a departure without a second exchange. Once a booking is taken it is answered on the address it arrived on, so the whole of it stays in one thread.

11

What travels with a consignment

A consignment travels under a note naming the sender, the receiving point, the number of pallets and the goods on them. The driver signs for what is collected and the receiving point signs for what arrives, and those two signatures make the movement traceable. Once the vehicle is back at Slough the signed copy returns to the office and is filed against the booking reference.

12

When a consignment arrives marked

Damage found at delivery is written on the note in front of the driver, and that marking starts every step that follows. The receiving point describes the condition in words on the copy the driver carries and keeps the matching copy. Once the marked note reaches the office the booking is pulled, the driver's account of the drop is taken, and the two are read together. The office works to written notice given within seven days of delivery, because by then a receiving point can still say what came off the tail-lift. The reply goes back in writing and sets out what the note and the account between them show.

13

Vehicle sizes and what a receiving point takes

A vehicle is chosen by what the receiving point can physically take, and only after that by what the consignment weighs. A 7.5-tonne box turns in a domestic-scale yard and reaches addresses a longer vehicle cannot approach at all. An 18-tonne box wants a straight run at the bay and room to swing a tail-lift clear of parked cars. A drawbar or an artic needs hard standing, a bay at deck height and a forklift on site. Once the receiving point is described accurately the class follows from that description, and the deck areas below are the ones section 08 is measured against.