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Issue 4 2012


///FREIGHT BREAK 66 get their kicks on Route A66


A total of 66 PD Ports employees in Middlesbrough will be taking part in the Great North Run for Butterwick Hospice this year. The run which takes place on Sunday 16 September aims to raise in the region of £20,000 for the local hospice. Mandy Shields, fundraiser at the hospice said “This is the biggest team we have ever had - PD Ports said that they would like to enter a team into the Great North Run, but we never expected such a fantastic response.” The ‘66’ team members from PD


Ports, which is also situated just off the ‘A66’ are already in training. Some super-keen employees are already organising running sessions in their lunch hour. Jerry Hopkinson, PD Ports’


managing director bulks, ports and logistics, said: “I knew we had a number of keen runners across the business but not of this


scale. This is all about the passion and commitment we have in supporting Butterwick Hospice with the benefit of getting fit and having fun in the process. “At PD Ports we take our social


responsibility very seriously within the communities in which we operate and as one of the region’s leading businesses and largest employers, we are proud to support the excellent service


Butterwick Hospice offers to its patients and their families,” concluded Mr Hopkinson. The hospice


has a


limited


number of places available for the Great North Run. Anyone else who would like to sign up should contact Mandy Shields at the fund-raising office on 01642 628930 or visit www. butterwick.org.uk and complete an application form online.


Squatters’ rights


I’ve got a brand new combine harvester... part


You wouldn’t think that express freight firms have much to do with the quiet, bucolic world of farmers – but this isn’t the case with Luſthansa’s time:matters division (their punctuation, not mine, by the way.) The ‘special speed’ logistics


division has just launched a Europe-wide Harvest Season Weekend Service for their


agricultural customers. Harvest time means operating at full speed – there are no days off; farmers and their machines are constantly on the go, 24 hours a day. If one of these extremely expensive harvesters does break down, it can cost a fortune, so spare parts are required as quickly as possible, and on any day of the week. The Harvest Season Weekend


Service offers continuous


weekend and holiday availability and around-the-clock customer service, and with the latest possible pick-up and earliest delivery


times. In the case


of orders placed on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays, time- critical spare parts already reach their destination on the following day throughout Europe.


Island enterprise The tiny Channel island of


Brecqhou seems a rather unlikely spot for a major freighting enterprise. For those that don’t know this part of the world, Brecqhou lies


just


off the larger island of Sark, near Guernsey and is the private fiefdom of two media moguls, the Barclay Brothers. Ironically for people who made a considerable fortune out of


newspapers, the Barclays are


famously reclusive; anyone attempting an unauthorised landing on their island fastness used to be seen off in no uncertain manner, although the tiny island is now reportedly open to day trippers. Anyway, the Isle of Brecqhou


Marine and Diving Operations company has a boat - a former Royal Navy vessel, the Brecqhou


Warrior - that was used to transport materials used to build the massive castle that the Barclays call home. With the project over, the tiny company has now started shipping freight, including timber and cars, from Guernsey to the French mainland. It has also gained permission to transport recyclable waste, the first such company in Guernsey to do so.


The Japanese tsunami recently turned Henry Ford’s old saying on its head, former Ford president Sir Nick Scheele told the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport UK’s Annual Logistics Conference recently. One of the results of the disruption was that the global car maker could offer its customers any colour they wanted - as long as


Not black, says CILT’s Sir Nick Sheele


it wasn’t black. Ford could no longer deliver its Tuxedo Black’ cars as the pigment was produced only by a single producer; which was based near the Fukashima nuclear plant He also revealed that - unknown


to each other – Chrysler, GM and a number of German car companies also used the pigment in their paints; but as they sourced their


paints from different suppliers but, thanks the paranoid levels of secrecy in the car industry, none were aware that they relied on this sole producer. This, said Mr Scheele, was a prime example of why manufacturers should share more information and ‘go for transparency’ to ensure that a single supplier’s failure could not have such a big impact on their supply chain. There is some controversy


over whether Henry Ford actually said the original phrase anyway, although a respected biography maintains that he did. Ford, ever on the lookout for cost savings, was using a new quick-drying paint that at the time was available only in black.


The editorial team at FBJ has had a bit of a downer on seagulls for as long as we can remember. However, these nondescript white and grey stealth bombers have somehow managed to get themselves listed as an endangered species in the Netherlands. Only one species of seagull, mind, but when they are en mass, it’s very hard to distinguish one from the other. The problem the port faced was


that these airborne pests had a habit of nesting on the ground and once they’d taken up squatters’ rights, anyone from the port that tried to


move them on was in line for a right rollicking from the environmentalists. But provided the port could stop them nesting on any bits of land it wanted to build on in the immediate future, all would be well. The question was, how to do that.


Over the years, the port authority tried various stratagems to get rid of the airborne squatters including, bizarrely, letting horses loose in the nesting area. That didn’t work because the horses were scared of them. Another solution was to send a man out on a tractor, which was effective but very expensive.


Black out Now though, a canine Inspector


Clouseau has come to the rescue. The Rotterdam port authority tells me that there is a breed of French dog – they weren’t any more specific than that – that can be trusted to harry the unwanted visitors into finding another abode. Apparently, they’re happy to run around for hours chasing birds. (I used to be like that too, come to think of it...) And, unlike Dutch tractor


drivers, they’re happy to accept a few chunks of scrag end instead of whatever the minimum wage is in Holland these days.


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