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EAB posted:I'm a soon to be owner operator. I looked into intermodal hauling and man, it doesn't seem worth it. Not only are the rates worst than most other freight but having to do 2-3 loads a day would suck and the wait times at railyards and ports holy poo poo. I don't see why anyone but a megacarrier would want to get into the intermodal business. I was only interested cause it seemed like I could be home most everyday but doesn't seem worth it. I do the occasionally truck driving to the ports as a sidejob for the company I work for as a dayjob as the IT Manager, but I first started here organising containers into the terminals so I've been one of the lucky few in the world to have to deal with the container terminals as both a logistics coordinator and as a driver Firstly they're just complete cunts to deal with, in regards to the ports in Sydney, they have 2 classes of carriers, A's and B's, I don't know what it's liked to be an A, but being a B basically means you're going to be completely hosed over constantly. They use a timeslotting system, there's X number of slots for each hours, they release these timeslots at 9:00am for A carriers and 9:15am for B carriers 2 days in advance, so Monday's release is for Wednesday's timeslots. For us B's they release 2 time slots for each hour, loving 2. here in Australia we can run B-Doubles so we can 2 containers at a time which just about everyone but the local guys do, so 2 time slots is enough for 1 truck. To get these time slots you have be sitting at your computer ready to hit the F5 at 9:14:59 and you get about 0.05 seconds to claim your time slots at the 9:15 release or you're hosed, if you miss them then by the time you've hit the back button every other time slot is taken because everyone just takes whatever the gently caress they can get in a mad panic, you can sit there and refresh the page every 10 seconds waiting for someone to give their time slots up though, and I know of multiple companies where this is literally a full time job, yes someone sits at a computer for 8 hours straight refreshing a web page waiting for a time slot so they can rush in a mad panic to be the first to claim it. All this then leads to a whole seperate black market trading ring for time slots. Then there's actually going to the ports, like I said the time slot is for an hour window. There's huge queues out the front to get in, and if you start queuing before your time slot starts you get told to gently caress off and your time slot gets cancelled, if they're having a bad day and everything is going slow and you get there right on when you're time slot starts, but then they take longer than an hour to get to you, they tell you to get hosed and cancel your time slot. The best part was 6 months ago the loving empty parks decided they had to start time slotting bullshit too, so now you get completely hosed dropping off your full containers, and then double hosed when you go try and pick up your empties. It's the loving worst run thing I've ever seen in my life, everything from top to bottom is completely hosed about Port Botany in Sydney. I only put up with it because I like driving trucks and making money, I have no idea how anyone stays sane having to deal with that poo poo on either the admin or driving side. Rudager fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 04:58
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George Zimmer posted:Jesus Christ. This makes the whole chassis/terminal issue at US ports look tame. The tiered carrier system seems like blatant favoritism. It's loving corrupt, it boils down to there being a handful of big carriers that have depots right next to the ports (and their main shareholders are the same companies that run the ports, funny that) where everyone dumps their boxes for them to literally drive a km or two around the corner into the terminal for a few hundred bucks each because they're the ones with all the back door connections to get in.
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Apr 23, 2015 00:35
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baram. posted:What's stopping companies from basically setting up a bunch of computers to run a script to try to claim the time slots? There probably was people doing that, then they put captcha's in about 18 months ago just as I was getting out of dealing with that bullshit.
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Apr 23, 2015 21:00
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