VALICON TRANS LTD

A vehicle leaves Slough on a route that is already committed, and the floor of that vehicle is finite. What the office sells is space on that floor for the hours the route takes, and nothing more abstract than that. Once a route is planned, every further booking competes for the metres left on the same deck. Weight matters at the axle, though on most working days the floor fills long before the plate does. The effect is that a load is slotted by the area it stands on and by the point a vehicle can still reach. Each of the twelve sections that follow is a consequence of that one constraint, which is why the sheet opens with it rather than with the company.

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 the load sits over the axles, but neither of those changes the floor area it occupies. The effect is that two consignments of identical tonnage can consume very different amounts of one vehicle. Once the base is known, the rest of the booking follows arithmetic anyone can repeat with a calculator.

The office therefore asks for the base in millimetres before it asks for anything else, since the base settles which departure has room. A load described only by its weight leaves the planner guessing at the one figure the deck is measured in.

Deck space is quoted in square metres, and a square metre is a unit very few people can picture accurately. Drawn beside the two bases that actually stand on a deck, it stops being abstract at once.

A UK base is wider than a square metre in one direction and the same in the other, so it covers 1.2 square metres rather than one. The effect is that a deck quoted at 8.4 square metres does not hold eight of them; it holds seven, and the remainder is a strip too narrow to stand anything on. A Euro base covers 0.96 square metres, which is why the same deck takes eight of those and the arithmetic changes with the base and not with the vehicle. Once that is seen once it is difficult to unsee, and it explains why the calculator in section 04 takes every figure down to a whole space rather than rounding it up.

The arithmetic below is a guide only, 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.

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

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 that the rest of its drops depended on.

The effect is that a run of a dozen or so drops is planned around access rather than around mileage. A receiving point three miles away with a blocked yard costs more of the day than one twenty miles west with a clear bay, which is the reverse of what a map suggests.

A delivery beside an airport is constrained before the vehicle arrives, because the perimeter roads carry conditions 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 rather than admitted late. Holding areas fill early, 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, even though the mileage is almost identical.

Colnbrook, Poyle, Longford, Harmondsworth, Sipson and Stanwell sit inside that allowance, and the perimeter leg exists to carry them together. Once a vehicle is through the gate it works the ground in one pass, since a second entry costs the same booking and the same checks as the first.

Shared-deck freight is classed before it is planned, because the class settles how much of a leg has to be arranged around it. The band is a planning class and a guide only: it names how a load is handled, and it settles no rate and reserves no vehicle. Two numbers reach it — how far out the ground sits, counted in rings, and how much floor the load stands on, counted in steps.

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

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

The effect is that a question asked a fortnight later is answered from paper rather than from memory. A note that was completed at both ends settles most queries in one exchange, and a note that was not completed at one of them rarely settles any.

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 for itself. 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 and in what order. The reply goes back in writing and sets out what the note and the account between them show, which is a narrower answer than an opinion but a more useful one.

A vehicle is chosen by what the receiving point can physically take, and only after that by what the load 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 already on site. Once the receiving point is described accurately, the class follows from that description rather than from a preference.

Bookings, rate enquiries and questions about freight already moving are handled by the transport office at Slough, which keeps them together against one reference. An 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 and the note at the end of it matches the enquiry at the start. The effect is that a reference given on the first morning is still the reference a month afterwards.