Talkin' Trucks With Mike:A History of the TNT Companies

I'm happy to see that the book have been deliveried to your home in good condition. Through the reading of the book you will see the different pièces of the puzzle come together and the contour of TNT Group takes shape.

I hope you will like it and as I told you : enjoy.

 

I’ve just started reading it I read a little bit here and there when I have time. One thing interesting is the focus on the management philosophy.

 

My favorite is TNT Canada Operation and all the companies they had up there.

What’s interesting is when the head man in the 1980s said you know it’s not about selling truck shipping or boat shipping what ever medium you want to use, it’s about the freight. We take the freight and decide what medium works best to ship it.

In other words truck, train, plane, car or van those are just tools in a big tool box and TNT takes a look at the freight and decides what tool in the tool box of freight moving machines works best to move the freight.

 

I would like to submit a brief case study which illustrates your words.

In Australia, the coastal container service of Associated Steamships (ASP), the largest coastal private shipping company partly owned by TNT (33%), was losing money heavily by 1974 because the cut-throat freight rates politic of the Government's Australian National Railways. In november 1975, TNT increased its shareholding in ASP to 50%. and even if TNT increased its investments in shipping around the world at a fast rate during this period it became apparent that its commitment to shipping was commercial rather than traditional when its Managing Director, Peter Abeles, commented on 5/2/1976 in the newspaper `` The Australian ``

Quote : `` I'm not a shipping man so I'm not in love with my ships ``

Radical actions followed the words few months later when TNT increased its shareholding to 62.5% and took full control of ASP. Taking advantage of the Railways very low freight rates TNT closed down the coastal container service, transferred ASP containers to rail, forming ASP Container Express with the assistance of rail freight experts at TNT.

ASP Container Express complemented the already very large TNT rail operations and increased the competition against Australian Natonal Railways ASP offering a one carrier door to door intermodal service not available from the railways company.

The two larger ASP ships was chartered to the recently established TNT affiliate, Trans Freight Lines, for the North-Atlantic trade.

M.V. Kooringa, the smaller ASP container ship on the coastal service :
KOORINGA - IMO 6409715 - ShipSpotting.com - Ship Photos and Ship Tracker

ASP containers on rail :
http://www.matts-place.com/intermodal/part4/aussie/20tntalldoor.jpg

 

So I've been reading @R. Buron s book on TNT and I'm at the part where TNT is just barely getting ready to move into the USA they are buying out Walkups express in San Fransisco and also looking at the Canadian market place, which TNT had a big foot print in Canada because they felt it was similar to Australia in a way and they could run really good in Canada.

USA was a little bit different then Australia and TNT seemed to struggle a little bit in the USA and as we know sold a lot of there companies off and broke up there USA operations in the middle 1990s.

 

The similarity between Australia and Canada is so great. In fact we can tell that Canada is the northern emisphere mirror of Australia.

Austrelia is a huge continent with three time zones where inside the continent the desert covers more then 30% of the country and the temperature can reach 40 centigrades. In Canada, in the east-west corridor, you have to move freight between Vancouver and Toronto almost 3000 miles, thousand of them through the bleak central Prairies and the unforgiving Canadian Rockies where in winter you have snow sometimes up to 14 feet deep in the mountain passes and glacial temperature.

In Australia 80% of the population lives within 80 miles of the coast and the natural resources are located in nothern Queensland and in the Nothern Territory very far from the population basin and economic activities. It's the same thing in Canada where the vast majority of the population live along the US border and the natural resources are located very far in the northern part of the country.

About TNT US operations, the Group struggled during twenty years to built prosperous operations in the country but with the Gulf War having generated a worldwide recession in early 90's and the Group having funded massively between 1985 and 1990 in its American as well as European operations, TNT was for the first time since its incorporation im a precarious financial situation.

So, the upper management in Sydney decided to

 

sacrifice the US operations in the purpose to protect its activities in Canada, Australia and Europe where TNT held a dominent position.

 

My friend you sir are an old soul God bless you at your young age you love the glory days of trucking and are proud of ur profession. Reminds me of my younger days, I was the kid who stopped when a rig went by, gave them the horn yank and a wave when they gave it a proud couple of pulls. Started driving at 18, class A (cdl) at 19.

 

Thanks I am. I do indeed like the old days and trucks better. My favorite trucks are the Ford trucks the Aeromax and the L8000 and L9000 I know a lot of people don’t like those trucks but I liked them.
The city that I live in just outside of Cleveland, Ohio used to have a bunch of Ford Aeromax garbage trucks and a hand full of Ford L8000 dump trucks as snow plows.

The city next door to where I lived had a couple of these units. I miss these trucks lots of character. I know a lot of people didn’t like driving them, but they were pretty popular with the local governments.

Anyhow that’s all boring municipal truck stuff. But yeah the TNT classic era was the best era for certain. An era that sadly will never be again, but that’s how it goes. Glad I was able to get the tail end of it.

 

I had a lot of @R. Buron s old TNT pictures up here from back when Hanks truck photos was around. A lot of cool TNT action up in Canada from the 80s and 1990s. Lots of cool pictures of freight and automotive assemble part hauling. We actually dived pretty deep into auto parts on this thread probably the deepest this forum has ever gotten on the entire auto parts logistics subject. We actually discussed Milk run theory and all of that. It’s grad school logistics level for sure.