Hi everyone,
This morning I passed my Hiab test at Wallace in London. It was a two-day course (although it lasted much less than two full working days) and only included the use of the hook, not the brick grab although I may do that in the future.
However, I won’t be using it in the near future, as I’ve got potentially two months’ class 1 work at a logistics depot starting tomorrow, doing night trunking from Heathrow to Coventry. I’ve had quite a bit of class 1 work the past month – almost as soon as my licence came through in late September, the work came through. To begin with it was with a scaffolding company, driving a day-cab tractor with a short (one or two-axle) flat-bed trailer delivering or collecting scaffolding to and from building sites, mostly in London. I’ve also done trunking trips for both parcel companies and pallet companies, including driving double deckers for two companies that are part of the big pallet-based hub-and-spoke freight networks. I’ve done some class 2 and 7.5T work in between, but I think most of my work the past few weeks has been class 1. It’s all been artics, and although I passed on a drawbar, nobody has asked if I took it on a drawbar or an artic. Reversing artics is still really tricky, particularly when it’s round corners. I always seem to need several shunts. Still, I’ve not reversed any of them into something yet.
I can’t speak for anywhere else in the country, but down here there’s plenty of work going and the “experience” barriers are breaking down. The company I start with on Monday had a vacancy a month ago, and my agency said he was putting me forward but they wanted an experienced driver (though maybe it was a different depot). So it’s a good time to be getting into this work in the south-east. I actually turned down a week of class 2 work on Thursday, in the hope of getting some class 1 work (I told them I’d accept it if they hadn’t filled it by Friday lunchtime, but by that time I’d secured another class 1 job, which I had to pull out of for the Heathrow job). It’s nice to be able to pick and choose but I’m hoping not to have to do that too much between now and Christmas.
