Hello all, Ive been on the road for 10 months now and seem to be learning the hard way, bad payers,very little money in the bank and spending any spare time repairing that old 26 tonner 
Lookin on the bright side though, 
building up relations with good customers and new people calling every couple of weeks which is why I am on here again asking for much needed advice. 
I have been asked to supply a price to deliver a couple of generators to Southampton Docks, is it a lottery how long you have to wait when you get there? I dont mind 3 or 4 hours but can it be worse than thatâ â ? 
Any replies would be much appreciated.
If it was me, going on what youâve said so far I would give them a price to take load there and then add a waiting time charge. You might have to give them the 1st hour for nothing but after that maybe charge them 25quid an hour or whatever.
I agree
Pauly
Good advice from the previous contributor.
Treat Southampton Docks like a supermarket. Go at peak times, expect to queue.
Go in later in the evening (9pm through to 3am) and youâll be in and out in an hour, nine times out of ten.
Also make sure you are booked onto the quay with a VBS reference and you know roughly what the procedure is at the docks.
More than happy to advise of you need any assistance.
Are the queues the same for non-container freight ? When Iâm delivering to the docks it depends on what youâre tipping. Steel can be faster than boxes as there tends to be less trucks on that kind of work.
As for your generators how they need to be taken off will determine the turn-around times.
I thought the queuing system at the ports was just for the container traffic because there is no ro room for empty boxes for restitution.
No wonder really with all our worldly goods coming in from China and us selling nowt
I would go with Hammerâs advice as that is what we do also ie charge for transporting to site if we are kept waiting for longer than an hour it is chargeable to the customer, the good thing with this is it almost always speedâs up your unloading time 
I had a problem there a while back because the lifting eye was a welded on part of the fabrication and not a manufactured eye through a bolt hole. The guy moaned that he wasnât sure if he could lift on it because he was not able to say the welding was good enough.
âHow do you inspect the welding on the area around the bolt hole then if a bolt on eye is usedâ, didnât seem to help, but seemed a reasonable question to me. They are like the idle swines at Shotton paper, in as much as they will spent half an hour looking for an excuse not to do a ten minute job!