alder:
Still don’t know if this thread is just a big windup, I suspect it is but I will play your game. You will definitely not get good money. In fact you will get the worse of the jobs.
Depends where you are. I know a lad who passed his test and for his first ever Class 1 job got a full time night trunking job with an agency at a company on the TPN pallet network, was and still is grossing £650 a week with 20hrs a week spent with his head in his pillow.
Frankeh, £2000 a month take home is not unrealistic, many of us are, but expect to do a 60hr week for it. Supermarket work is easy to get into on agencies and it pays a premium, especially coming up to Xmas, because not many people want to do it because for haulage its a bit of hard work. You will go to a supermarket and typically have up to 80 wheeled cages to unload and then an equivalent amount of empties to put on. You’re not rushed and it’ll keep you fit. A lot of truck drivers don’t do it because they just want to drive to places, open up the doors/curtains and have someone else do the work which is why so many are fat.
In regards to ADR, its no longer worth it. It pays maybe 50p to £1/hr more for a lot of risk. Petrol tankers are the only ADR worth doing and that is all but a closed shop. As for continental work it no longer pays above UK work like it did. You can get better paid work here so the only reason for doing continental is because of the lifestyle it offers. I would not do continental if you’ve a family or wife or a girlfriend you want to keep as you can be away for weeks at a time. It also has its own issues - apart from a few exceptions lorries cannot move in France on a weekend so if you’re not at Calais or Dunkirk by the stroke of midnight on Friday you’re not going home til Monday.
Tramping is crap in my opinion wholly due to the lack of truckstops and parking. You end up parking a lot in laybys and on industrial estates with nowhere to get a hot meal unless you have cooking gear in your cab, nowhere to get a wash or even take a crap. You do however end up getting to see more of the country. I for example rarely get to go down to the south west past Bristol, down to the south coast or north of Lockerbie because its further than I can do in a day from my base.
Trunking is easy work and easy money but it is menial and soul destroying to anyone with even the remotest amount of intelligence. I’m lucky in that we’ve got 10 different places we trunk to on a night but most of the jobs available involve going to one or two places at the most. How long do you think you can drive the same 300 miles a night, 5 nights a week?
Don’t listen to the whiners on here, they keep on bleating on about imaginary good old days and fantasy wages. They’re right, its not the job it used to be and for the majority of the job that is no bad thing. A lot of the camaraderie has gone though and that is pretty much the biggest thing that’s got worse but for much of the rest of it its a vast improvement. I was driving in those “golden years” and they were far from good and the only way you’d earn the money mentioned is by having no life, leaving home on Monday morning, not returning til Saturday afternoon, being out all week in the lorry doing max hours and usually involving a bit of running bent. The job I’m doing now which is exactly the same company and the same as it was when I did it in 1994 pays almost 3 times what it did 20 years ago so I doubt many of those claims. But the fact is you’re coming into the job now so have no experience of what it was like and therefore have no rose tinted glasses to look through and will base it on what you think of it now compared to what you’ve done before. If you start today you have no idea whether its good or bad compared to what it was like 30 years ago because you weren’t doing it back then.
nobody likes their job and no matter what industry you talk to they all say it’s crap. I might not be doing for this for the rest of my life but I need to earn money for now so that’s why I need the advice. As for the Class one, I’m not paying for the course so I may as well do it.
