The sum sound about right tryed to get on them myself but as said before it who you know in that part of transport but a good gig if u stuck it out some guys don’t last coz of the wee cabs and am not driving that attitude
The top earners at our place earn between £45,000 to £50,000, one even earned more. That’s on set routes, driving boxes and double decks and home every day. A lot easier than transporting cars.
What companies would be good to look into?
It’s a shame the plum jobs are dished out on a nepotism/dead mans shoes/who you know basis rather than actual experience, qualifications, or even “life skills” from working in a variety of other jobs non-driving related.
I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of us on here, myself included that would really like to have a 40-50 hour week contract full time earning £50k.
What’s the furthest one might be expected to take some cars just picked up at the docks btw?
I see them being loaded up at Sheerness sometimes… I’ve often wondered how far they’ve got to be taken?
Bulldog164:
What companies would be good to look into?
Stobart automotive, Carlson, STVA…
You have to be very lucky to get to the top earning jobs straight away, the big and better companies will take on unknowns but usually you will either have a provable track record in transport of job commitment and competence, or you’ll be a good friend or family of an already trusted current employee…but that doesn’t apply to car transporters alone, it applies at all the best jobs in the industry where if they give you a start it will be strictly on a successful provisional period and you won’t usually earn the big bucks by getting on the premium work/shifts until you’ve proved yourself capable.
Very few car carrier operators, and no good operator i know of, would take on an unskilled lorry driver or one with an unproven record, the risks are too great.
You have to look at it from the company point of view, it takes £thousands to train a transporter driver, and with the best will in the world the drop out rate is horrendous, so they need to be absolutely sure you are going to stay the course and stay with them for a good number of years, they wouldn’t last long in the game if they invested serious money in training and then bringing on a good potential recruit who then proceeds to do tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage, and/or, after the novelty of grafting like a lorry driver did in 1970 wears off, the recruit jacks the job in as not for him…rinse and repeat.
Family (sons especially) are a fair bet usually, as often enough they have the same work ethic, or not as the case may be, recommendations from friends are good too, a trusted dependable driver in a premium job isn’t going to put people up who are going to ruin the job, self preservation and all that.
If someone starts then has a serious pile up/bridge strike, or have constant regular damage (a new alloy wheel/tyre might be £1000, a roof clout or welded body part damage might de-class the vehicle with an immediate penalty of 30% the vehicle’s value) it might be a bill for a £quarter of a million plus if a loaded vehicle is rolled.
There is a current shortage of transporter drivers and in the next ten years that shortage will become a crisis as the aging drivers retire (if they make retirement at all, many don’t), this is not a job to be doing into your late 50’s and 60’s though many of that age are still doing it, it’s physically some of the hardest work in the industry coupled with long hours for the vast majority of those doing it, it’s mentally taxing too, you cannot switch off even for a moment or it will all go wrong.
Loading combinations/strapping is a work of art in itself, the modern 11/12 car carrier is a complicated expensive piece of equipment, if you don’t load it with some thought to weighting (especially on multi drop) you can soon run into stability problems leading to the tail wagging the dog, leading in worse case to rollover when just like a small car towing an ill weighted overloaded caravan it all goes pear shaped and the trailer takes over.
The modern transporter may look like an artic, and indeed the prime mover is normally a standard low cabbed (then cut lower) tractor unit, but the towing hitch is behind the drive axle, hence you have the same scenario as a SWB land rover towing an almost centre axled trailer twice its size and heavier when loaded (especially when the driver loads the trailer alone which i’ve seen countless times, and heavy stuff right at the back just to ensure its a menace).
Even loaded correctly they are nothing at all like driving a normal lorry, drive it like the usual suspects we see every day and it’ll all be over literally in both ways in minutes.
Its not a job for everyone, hence why there as currently vacancies for drivers on nearly all the companies, yes even the ones who claim to have a waiting list as long as your arm.
Juddian:
hence why there as currently vacancies for drivers on nearly all the companies, yes even the ones who claim to have a waiting list as long as your arm.
Strange…
Wow… Plenty of food for thought there. Despite fancying myself at being good at the physics of the whole thing - I hadn’t considered the “off balance” aspect that I would clearly not be used to.
I think you also suggest here that those transporters that seem to regularily run off the A34 into fields - might well be doing just that for the sort of reasons you have mentioned in length…
I remember also being puzzled whilst watching the loading/unloading procedure at sheerness docks - where a whole team of “car drivers” suddenly appear to manually drive the cars on/off the transporter, and across to the far side of the dock. I have do dodge around them coming and going with the paper wagon I’m driving… “It’s not the transporter driver doing this bit of the job on their own” I’m observing…
If I’m cut out for anything fancy in truck driving circles - I always fancied specializing in dangerous chemicals. I’ve worked as a lab tech as my first job after leaving school, and indeed Chemistry was my best subject at school. I can’t say I fancy the Explosives & Radioactives side - but things like Corrosives, Poisons, & Firestarters never bothered me.
The “Contact Poisons” are probably the nastiest things I’d expect to be handling on a regular basis… Things like Phenol, Hydroflouric Acid, and Dimethyl Mercury.
Karen Wetterhahn - Wikipedia (“One or two drops of Dimethyl Mercury on GLOVED hand”)
http://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/HumanResources/OccupationalHealthandSafety/GuidanceNotes/ChemicalAgents/TreatmentofPhenolBurns/ (“Precautions when handling Phenol”)
http://www.ab.ust.hk/hseo/tips/ch/ch005.htm ("HF kills by poisoning the body’s calcium ie. in bones in particular, rather than as a “corrosive agent”. Victims die from an internally crumbling skeleton from the “Acute Flouride Poisoning”. Calcium Gluconate gel gives the HF something else full of calcium to attack instead of the victim’s bones - IF applied quickly enough…)
Whereas I’ve never handled Dimethyl Mercury myself, I have handled cadmium compounds from spent old-style batteries - which can be argued to be “almost as bad” as the mercury compounds in terms of “subtle poisoning” that one does not realise until too late…
Sorry… I’ve gone a bit off topic here.
Let’s swing it back to “Specialist Trucking” by asking the question “What special considerations need to be made when transporting a double decker full of live animals”? 
Car transporters need special physics considerations from what you said in your previous post. I’m wondering if I’m a bit past it at 50 this year to get into this game this late in the day as it were… 
If Stobart drivers or Freshlinc drivers will work max hours including Saturday when they can get about 40 K per years including night out.in my job if i will work all possible hours i can earn about 40 k per years and move just fresh food.
JOB ADVERTISE IN INTERNET OR NEWSPAPERS -IT IS NOT CONTRACT,IT IS JUST REKLAMA.
when i first started out in the game i wanted to work for either shell or ici or car transporters.
you would never a get a job back then with firms like them, as the only time a job came up for those jobs was when someone had died. today you can find jobs driving transporters or petrol or other substances etc and the reason the jobs are out there is ■■?
well make you own minds up on why there are now jobs going in those types of jobs
alamcculloch:
That works out at less than 1K per week,so its not that much…
!!! 
!!!
Blimey. Food for thought indeed.
I’m already driving a tanker (class 2) but thinking of moving to class 1 for better money. The only thing stopping me is £28k salary and finishing at 1pm like today…
Winseer.
The yardies you see ferrying cars to and from the lorries to the dockside are taking them between dockside (or compounds at car factories/storage) and the load lanes (or vice versa with compound transers/export) where the transporter driver can inspect and pick and choose which order he wants the cars in depending in how they’ll fit and drop order…i’ve never seen depot yardies load a road transporter…train yes.
I packed the game in at 55 after 20ish years on the cars, and not a moment too soon, the job took it’s toll on me and i’d had more than enough.
Usually paid in a combination of hours and car number and size and drop bonuses or in some cases different hourly rates depending on what you are doing (loading/loaded/driving), invariably the drivers on bonus are grafting and the hourly lads maximising (whilst not mucking about either), do you really want 60 plus hour weeks of this at 50?
Anyway, by now you should be fully up to speed at Breitbart London and heading for a career shift writing articles… 
Pimpdaddy:
Themoocher:
Is it hard to get into?
I’ve heard few guys saying it’s stressful loading and unloading the motors.I have no idea, it all seemed like good fun to me because I seek adventure. Some people can just walk straight into it easily from what I’ve seen but my face didn’t fit in most places as a driver so I left it…
How hard did you try? You seem to be the most negative bloke on this site who can never find a permanent job.
Judehamish:
How hard did you try? You seem to be the most negative bloke on this site who can never find a permanent job.
Depends what your definition of hard is, I researched the job, who and where the hauliers were, what it entails, the pay, the training etc then I started speaking to drivers that did it wherever I saw them (services, dealerships, ex colleagues I had worked with). With all the info I had gathered I started knocking on doors in person, handing my cv out several times to the locally based companies, calling /emailing back and forth for well over a year but only managed to get 1 interview. The guy wasn’t interested and didn’t have the balls to tell me to my face, out of the 5 drivers interviewed that day all the other 4 drivers were offered jobs, I had to chase them up to see what was happening, waste of time and effort in the end.
While I was chasing car transporters I was also chasing jobs in other fields I had qualifications in then out of the blue one company (not transport/haulage) emailed me, invited me to an interview and offered me a permanent position and that’s what I do now. Call me negative or whatever you like but I’m just sharing the reality of my life.
My Best pal works for stva and he is very close to £50k and that is 4and half days
Juddian spells it out well from obviously years of experience but a couple of things he didn’t mention and will no doubt now add comment on:
Not bad this time of year but wait till you’re loading cars into the front slot on the top deck when the decks are iced up in winter - then you’ve gotta walk back down.
Car drivers giving abuse because they can’t figure out why you’re driving towards them on their side of the road because there are overhanging trees on your side.
Many years ago I worked for a Ford main agent where one of my duties was receiving the new car deliveries, so used to talk to the Toleman drivers regularly. Some years later I spent a few days with an independant car haulier co. driver and did some of the driving.
Driveroneuk:
Juddian spells it out well from obviously years of experience but a couple of things he didn’t mention and will no doubt now add comment on:Not bad this time of year but wait till you’re loading cars into the front slot on the top deck when the decks are iced up in winter - then you’ve gotta walk back down.
Car drivers giving abuse because they can’t figure out why you’re driving towards them on their side of the road because there are overhanging trees on your side.
Many years ago I worked for a Ford main agent where one of my duties was receiving the new car deliveries, so used to talk to the Toleman drivers regularly. Some years later I spent a few days with an independant car haulier co. driver and did some of the driving.
Quite, apart from nasty slippery decks there’s hundreds of things going on at any one time, in winter just one headache is trying to open drivers windows when they’re frozen shut and not enough fuel to get it warm enough to unstick them, then you plonk your arse down on 11 freezing cold seats (many leather) and after about 4 you think you’ve had a ■■■ change…course being the cold you need umpteen piddles so end up having to do sit down girly wees cos your tackle’s vanished… 
In summer you’ve got to get into 11 blisteringly hot cars with seats that burn your arse (arms on window sills), end up sweating like a pig…fortunately you’ve tackle now allows stand up wees which is great cos its warm you don’t need one… 
Trees are a PITA (and since local PSV deregulation no bugger cuts ‘em back), you can forget prat nav, just because a bridge isn’t on your route doesn’t mean you can go that way, it might be navigable with a flat load, say 14’ but a full load at 15/16’ might mean a 50 mile diversion or revising drop order so low tree areas can be tackled once you’ve got rid of a few and restacked…bearing in mind the aforementioned stability problems.
You need to know the road well, that massive bump (now gone) near the no HGV allowed services at Oxford A40 jct on the A34 Northbound was capable of setting up enough of a bounce to smash the 10th car (the one you see with the nose sticking out the back in the middle on fully loaded modern carriers) into the deck above, unless you allowed for extra suspension bounce, so you had to take all sorts of things into account when loading and adjusting deck heights.
Wasn’t a problem a few years ago because we used to strap cars down underbody which effectively clamped them to the deck, then suits got involved and that’s no longer allowed, now it’s chocks and wheelstraps so not only are the cars constantly on the move suspension wise shaking straps loose, but in the event of a rollover ( running higher so higher CoG so more likely?) the cars come off and go flying off all over the road. Brilliant.
Typical UK bollox up, we managed perfectly well tying 'em down proper for around 50 years, it wasn’t broke so the fixed it, progress huh?
Anyway, £50k sounds wonderful, and to be fair if you’re the right age and got what it takes that can set you up for life if you don’t ■■■■ it up the wall, but you will in most cases earn every penny of that money…and other driving jobs are catching up where you won’t see the same top line but you’ll do a lot less hours or days working yet earn the same amount per hour worked after you’ve worked your wages out as every driver should…that is divide your top line by the number of hours worked to get a mean hourly rate, it’s the only way to compare.