goods ordered and missing parts or not delivered.
My youngest son is renovating his new house , Builders in and plumbers electricials plasterers the works. Yesterday the kitchen units came but 4 parts missing so hopefully will be delivered there today.
I ordered a remote key fob on the 3rd as Sue lost one for the garage door. Just had an email saying going to send another as it appears DHL have lost the item.
what is going on? claims of lack of delivery drivers??? don’t think so judging by the number of lorries on the roads
There are half a million HGV’s registered in the UK & almost all HGV drivers fund their licences. Which now cost around £5000 to get a class 1 (C+E) & that is if you pass your tests first time. You first need the rigid licence & then take a second training session & test for the bendy with a detachable boot.
Supermarkets are incredibly environmentally unfriendly in the way they operate vehicles used for deliveries to stores & depots. For example, their own trucks deliver goods to stores & then return several hundred miles to their depots empty, even if they are driving past suppliers on the way back. HGV1’s do an average of around 6-7 miles per gallon empty, so that equals millions of wasted gallon each year. Another example of how environmentally unfriendly supermarkets are is. I have delivered vegetables & fruit from Europe which has been delivered to depots in the Fens, then unloaded from the foreign vehicle & put directly onto my vehicle to be delivered to supermarket hubs, that the European vehicle drove within 10 miles of.
Every night, every local parcel deliver depot send at least two hgv vehicles out to hubs with parcels collected from customers during the day. At the hubs the parcels are sorted & the vehicles reloaded with deliveries for the next day. So that is thousands of trucks nationally every night. Just for parcel deliveries.
Basically, if you have brought it. It has at some point been on the back of an HGV. I have driven all over the country delivering meat, windows, wine, porn, childrens books, vehicles, rolls of paper, pharmaceuticals, firearms, even feathers, sewage & secure loads where I had no idea exactly what was onboard. Plus lots of other things.
so why not use rail transport more? that would take a lot of lorries off the roads. Then it would be local delivery vans instead of great artics taking up 2 lanes of a motorway one trying to overtake the other for many miles. think of the gallons of fuel saved
Because rail transport is incredibly expensive & it only gets goods so far. A 3.5 ton transit van, does about 15 mpg on the average commercial fleet & have a maximum load capacity of 2 tons. A 10 ton ridgid truck carries a lot more load for a similar mpg to a transit. The fact is HGV’s are far better value per mile than a van for loads over 2 - 3 tons.
Also every mile by rail required tax subsidisation. Every mile by road delivers tax. And you still need trucks to take good to the railway line & then deliver it the other end. And every class 1 vehicle would need at least 20 vans to replace it. Workout the cost of running 20 vans with deisel, road tax, insurance, driver etc. Plus not every load can be moved by a van. I have driven long, wide & heavy loads that do not even fit onto normal trucks.
But some loads are intermodal. Sometimes it makes sense & when it does, it happens.
