HINTS FOR HAULIERS.
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An Occasional Chat on Subjects and Problems of Interest to those Who are Engaged or About to be Engaged, in Running Commercial Vehicles for a Living.
IPROPOSE to take up again the parable of the lorry which carried many loads, and of the driver who worked without wages. Last week I described a day's work, or, niore strictly speaking, one mixed—very mixed—journey of a country carrier's lorry, the story being told chiefly for the purpose of explaining the meaning of the term tonmile. I had .explained to some extent, so far as mere words will allow, " the meaning of the term, and had hinted at some of its drawbacks from the ' point of view of the haulier, and am at the moment. in the middle of a diagrammatic explanation. I have imaginal a. country road and -onejourney, in the course of which the lorry has made a number of calls, taking on and discharging a miscellaneous collection of loads. The road has been shown graphic
ally, and aleo the loads, .
I will ask the Editor kindly to reproduce, from last week's issue of this paper, those illustrations which
are here numbered Figs. 1 and 2, so that the reader may be saved the trouble of looking round for his original copy. Fig. 2 is the most important. It will be seen to consist of a number of rectangles, or oblongs, above a line lettered A, B, C, D, E, and station. The letters represent farms at which the lorry has -called, the station is one. endof the journey, and H is the home of the lorry. The oblongs represent loads which are picked up and put down. It will be observed, for example, that a load is picked up at A and put down at D, another picked up at D and put down at the station. That is all the explanation I can give, this week of Fig. 2. Readers who are interested and who did not see • last week's issue must get a copy, that is all.
Fig. 3 is a new one this week, and illustrates the return journey from the station. A ton of coal had to be picked up there and brought back to D. This is shown by the long rectangle shaded by lines sloping up from right to left. It is supposed to be one ton high. At E, on the plan, a call is made for a load of 24 tons of straw, which has to be delivered to C. This lead, too, is shown by an oblong, but the oblong has to be broken at just over 1), in order to show the drop in the total lead on the lorry when a delivery ia7made there., Having made that delivery at 0, the lorry runs home to H, and during that. portion of the journey the ton mileage is nil because there is no useful load on the vehicle. We may now 630 set about calculating, from our diagrams, the actual ton-mileages for the journey, as well as those which would be chargeable to the different customers.
First of all, it will be rather interesting to see how the ton-mileage mounts up as the journey proceeds. Starting on the outward journey, it is nil from H to Ae where the first load is taken on. From A to B it is II tons by mile, which is Nths of a ton-mile. From B to C the distance is 1 mile, and the total load carried is 2i tons. The ton-mileage is, therefore, 21for that stretch. From C to D the distance is iths of a-mile, and the total load is 34 tons ; the ten-mileage is thus 11 by 34 = 1.22 ton-miles. The next run is the long one of 94 miles te the station, with a load of 34 tons. For that portion of the journey the record is 32.7 ton-miles. On the return journey the tonnage is constant for the first 4 miles, from the station to E, and the ton-mileage is 4. From E to D the total load is 34 tons, and the mileage is 54, so that the ton-mileage is 18.7. From D to 0, ithe of a mile, the load is 24 tons, and the tonmileage fttlia The last part of the trip, from C to
H (home), the record is nil.
The totals are as follow:—On the outward journey, 37.6 ton-miles, and on the return, •23.6 ton-miles ; grand total, 61.2 ton-miles. What about the charges? The actual mileage under load is, out. , wards, 114, and return, 10; total, 21,i miles. No account is, of course, taken of the dead mileage between H. and A on the outward run, or between C and H on the return. This is allowed for in our.
reckoning " establishment charges."
According to the tables on page 557 of this journal for June 14th last, is. id. per mile should be the I charge for a four-tonner, •plus a further charge of 8s. 4d. per hour for all the time occufied on the job, including travelling time. Now it is impossible, in reckoning charges, to ignore the -time factor altogether, and I therefore suggest that we shall still have to charge our 8s. 4d. per hour on top of the ton-mileage charge if we must charge per ton-mile.
I may therefore equate the mileage charge to the ton-mileage, and thus get a unit for the latter. The. charge, reckoned at is. id. per mile, would be 21i• by is. ld., which amounts to 21 3e. 61d. Since this is to b.e the charge for 61.2 ton-miles, the charge per ton-mile must be. 21 3s. 62d. divided by 61.2, which is 4.6d.
Actually, the lorry might have carried it full load of 4 tons all the way, in which case the tonmileage would have been 87, and the charge per tonmile would have worked out at 34d. On the other hand, the load throughout might never have been more than 1 ton, in which case the ton-mileage would only have been 21i, and the charge per ton-mile would have had to have been is_ id.
This variation in the needful charge shows' I think, better than anything the futility of trying to charge on the ton-mile basis, The point the owner has to keep in mind is that in order that hie business shall nay a reasonable profit, he must get la id. per mile plus a time, charge of about 8s. 4d: per hour. No fancy reckoning-of ton-mileages will get behind that,. nor reduce his expenses. If on occasion he accepts less than that, he does so in the ordinary hazard of , business, in the hope that he will be able to recoup himself later on.
The truth is that there is no copybook method of charging for work of the kind which we are discussing. Every job will have to he reckoned up on its own, in the light of the haulier's experience, not only of the work, but of the people with whom he is dealing. All that he may have as a.guide are the figures in The. Commercial Motor for June 14th, to which I have already referred. .Instead of worrying about ton-mileage, he wilt carry in his head figures of how long it takes Tom Jones's men to load or unload, what the chances are that John Smith will have that hay ready when he does call, or how much of his time, and that of his lorry, is „likely to be wasted while he waits on Mr. Brown's pleasure. Those are the things that matter when he is estimating. If we consider the abovejourney in that light, we shall chtain some really useful figures. That I Will do next week, but. in the meantime 1 must answer one or two more urgent queries which have cone along.
First of all, I will answer the questions which appear in the letter. which has been responsible for all this trouble. The writer, " A.B.M.M., ' wants to know how much he lutist charge for the hire of the car for a 7 miles' journey, o:u.t and home, meaning, I suppose, for a total of 14 miles.. The answer is, according to our tables on the aforesaid page, is. Oct. per mile (the machine is a throe-tonner), plus 7s. 6. per hour, so that if there is a delay of half an hour at each end of the journey and, the travelling time is one hour, the total is 14s. 7d.or mileage and 15s. for the total time, 29.. 7d. in all Next question :—" Should I ,charge $o much per mile per passengerl " The answerto this is :=" Do as you please." About 2s. 3d. per mile is the charge, so that if there are, as is stated in a later question, six passengers, the charge for each will be 40. per toile. The other questions are answered in the reply to these two. Six passengers on a three-tonner is, of course, absurd. but such is the question. .Another correspondent asks what he should charge in -connection with a four ton lorry. The -answer is to be found in the issue of June 14th, and is is. id. per mile for the distance travelled, plus 8s. 4d. per hour for the total time occupied on the job, that of travelling as well as that of waiting. THE S.KOTCR.