This is a job where you want to be paid (decently) by the hour.
Strangely, whilst on agency - I was never offered a single shift at these establishments… 
I did multidrop transit van via agency for a while for yodel/
was a nightmare at 1st but after a while your find your going to same places all the time. and was given set postcode areas.
so didnt do much milage wise. was for ever stopping starting.
once youve done it a while get to know the places it does get quicker .
saying that id never do it again. is ok short term untill something else comes along.
guess i was lucky though was via agency paid by the hour. think these days drivers are paid per parcel around 80p i think
Another ex-Nightfreight victim here, did from Weymouth down to the Devon border in a 15-tonner for my first lorry job. 50-odd drops a day plus another 20 more than went on a local van subbie. There was so much for such a wide area on that route they used to send a van from depot too, then one day pulled the plug. I gave up at that point…
With the spectacles we were given, a nice pink tint, the job was good, it really was, start at 8, finish at 5 with an hour for lunch. Depending on the area it could be 30/35 drops (Yorkshire Dales) up to 130 drops in York City, generally anything over 85 drops got you a young boy to bully, sorry help!
I was about 19 and got my class 3 with them when I was 21. My money was good and overtime and bank holidays were well paid if we did them. Biggest problem for me was the Unions
I used to fight with the lad who did the Dorchester run over who should deliver the village of Puncknowle (pronounced “Punnel”)- there was a woman there who used to regularly order one small package, her house was slap on the border between the two areas and convenient for neither. To my abiding shame, I once stuffed one of her packages behind a radiator in the warehouse and marked it on the run sheet as “lost at hub”. Three times. I don’t know whether it even got delivered, mind - I got sacked not long after for bringing back all the drops that would’ve been on the back-up van they’d decided to scrap…
Beaminster was another bone of contention, and arguably shouldn’t even have been covered by our depot.
I done Nightfreight as well. Really poor management, zero health and safety (quite liberating but dangerous at times) and often crazy work loads.
Nightfreight bacially took the crap no one else would touch. So having a 200kg worktop, small fragile parcels, trees, bicycles, car engines, 4m lampposts and anything else you could think of wasn’t uncommon. Also they didnt have well placed depots so I often got in at 7am finished loading at 9am and drove 60 miles to my area in which I had a timed 9:30 delivery.
Sounds familiar - my nemesis was ride-on lawnmowers… 