A different way to get stuff to Festival?

[mrsbrown]

The concept: Instead of hiring a truck to get stuff to Festival next year, we get a larger group of people together and arrange for a freight company to transport a shipping container of stuff directly to the Festival site.

A quick look yielded the following

http://www.freight.qr.com.au/

I'm sure there's more. Does anyone have professional or amateur experience in this?

Comments

[celsa.livejournal.com]

Excellent idea. I'll ask around, but can't think what kind of groups would have cause to use such things. Scouting Jambourees, perhaps? Outback concerts? Or do they use trucks?

[doushkasmum.livejournal.com]

Thinking about this, Tim built a packing crate to ship his stuff places. It was made to fit in a trailer and stood just over a meter high. This would work as an individual containerization for people wanting to go in with this plan, or if we can't get a whole container's worth we could make a few of these for our stuff which a shipping company would not have trouble with, they could treat them like pallets.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

My industry live on them, and sometimes in them - television, rock and roll, circusses, rock and roll circusses on television.

I'll ask around - one of the folks I work for ship a couple of containers around Australia all the time.

(You know, you can buy second hand shipping containers for around 10 grand ....)

It's probably cheaper to hire a truck than a container, though.

sol.
.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

To elaborate. For a container, you're hiring a driver and a truck to travel to and from your destination twice. And a container. Also, the smallest you'll get is a 20 footer, and though I have no doubt that stuff to be transported will expand to fill available transportation, you can hire trucks in a range of sizes in between 3 and 20 tonnes.

Also, the real kicker is that Festival site will, almost by definition, not be on a major highway, and taking trucks with shipping containers offroad is not a cheap proposition.

Which said, I can almost certanly get you a ballpark figure for a 20 or 40 footer. I'm just not sure it's really practical.

Also, in the meantime, off the top of my head:
http://www.membreys.com.au/
http://www.larthur.com.au/

sol.
.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Righto. I chatted to my housemate, who used to work in the freight/logistics industry:

----------------------------------
The issues I'd see are:
. Hiring the container isn't going to be cheap to start with, not to mention keeping it somewhere handy to pack it and then having it picked up.
. Yass is even less on the standard list than Canberra, so it would basically be "Canberra rate plus some more for having to turn off the highway and find the damn place."
. It's not even Yass, it's a property kinda near Yass. Taking even a 20-foot-capable truck on dirt roads out to a property is less than fun, and not cheap.
Well, under the circumstances, it'd be almost cheaper to actually *buy* a 20' container - they go for about $1500 - $2000, yours to keep, no hassles with detention rates or returning it, and in a range of four colours!

Oddly enough, Yass might be cheaper then canberra, purely because it's on the way to Sydney. Bugger all goes to Canberra from Melbourne - in fact, I'm not certain there's even a freight train line there. From Sydney maybe, but not from melbourne.

What's the killer for me, and probably why you should forget the idea is this: Do they have a means of getting the container off the back of the truck? Because if not, that'll mean a sideloader (standard container truck with two crane attachments on each end - chains link to the container, place it on the ground) and sideloaders are pricey, and OH&S forbids them to put containers on/off on uneven ground. And even if you had a concrete apron there, I wouldn't touch the job myself - too many unknown factors, one off job, country work, etc.

Honestly? It'd be cheaper and better to get one or two 3 tonne hire trucks with tailgates (like we moved our house with) and move it up that way. You're looking at less hassle, and in the range of thousands of dollars cheaper.

----------------------

So even if there happened to be a forklift on site (actually, it's now kinda tempting to go to Festival just to set up period block and tackle to do the job, but then it'd have to be a trucky prepared to accept my signoff on the rig, which would never happen unless I knew them personally, and there's no way Festival insurance would cover it...), it's probably nowhere near feasible.

3 tonners well packed, or even an 8-ton and someone with a Medium Rigid license, though insurance starts to climb steeply there.

For reference, do I infer correctly that you hired a truck this year? What was the cost and size, if so?

sol.
.