Rail network a helping hand for trucking companies

Tomoana Warehousing truck driver Arthur Smith on his way to offload logs at Napier Port. Photo/Warren Buckland.

With the rise of rail in Hawke's Bay, logging truck companies are adamant they will still be needed.

Tomoana Warehousing Ltd founding director Trevor Taylor said it would not put them out of pocket.

"My understanding is that rail may only handle approximately 20 per cent of the logs that are going to go through the port of Napier," Taylor said.

"It will not ease the burden from the point of the requirement of trucks to actually take the logs out of the forest. It's going to make a massive flow of log trucks in and out of Wairoa and hopefully they can cope with that."

He said while the KiwiRail Network expects to remove around 5500 trucks off the road a year once the Napier-Wairoa line gets up and running over the next week, it would only take it off a certain part of the road.

"Someone has to transport the logs from the forest to wherever the rail head is. We will be like a number of companies that just increase the number of log trucks that we have on the road so we are planning to increase our fleet number."

Although it was not the first time, they had only recently started up again in logs due to the opportunity that has arisen with the sheer volume.

Central area president and Hawke's Bay branch chairman of the Road Transport Association, Ian Emmerson said it "is a very good initiative if we can make it work all round".

"In actual fact, most of the local companies are struggling to do the volumes that they've got now because there is big demand on logs and big volumes to move."

He said a lot of new equipment was going on the road to try to cater for logs outside what the rail is going to do.

"From an industry association point of view generally we support the initiative 100 per cent," Emmerson said. "The interest we have is road transport but we also would prefer to see that volumes are moved the most economic and logical way and our roads not damaged any more for essential freight movement."