Welcome back to Trucks, where we’re going to take a look at the role trucks play in the road haulage industry and how they’re used across both long and short road distances to transport goods from point to point.
Road haulage is big business and you can’t drive along any highway without seeing many trucks along the way, going in both directions. That’s because despite their enormous sized and load handling volume and ability, these huge road trains are actually often more economical to run than any other type of overland transport.
You might be scratching your head and thinking, hey, the railway surely must be the cheapest way to get heavy goods from one end of the country to the other! While that is certainly the case where the goods are just transported by train, there are additional costs involved regarding the collection of the goods from their originating location, unloading and then loading aboard the train, then when they reach their destination train station, they need to be unloaded, then loaded aboard a truck or panel van which will take them to their final destination address for delivery.
When you send the same goods direct via truck, all that additional loading and unloading is cut out. Depending upon the type and size of load, this can prove to add more cost to the train transportation method than would be incurred by sending the goods direct by truck.
So you can see that there are more reasons that you might have originally thought for using trucks for overland road haulage than at first glance.
