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Every haulage company carries one load or another throughout the day. From food to medicines and spare parts to equipment – you just never know what the next is going to be. Of course, some haulage companies specialise in abnormal and unusual loads, having built experience in just that kind of work. They know who they have to get in touch with to navigate a strange or unusual load from one place to another, and they get the job done with as little hassle as possible. Other companies are often quite happy to leave this part of the haulage business to the strange loads experts, so to speak! Specialised equipment and vehicle are often required for some loads of this nature in order to get them from A to B, so it makes sense to have specialists to do the job. But what are some of the strangest jobs that have been done in this way? A dead whale Most haulage companies would agree they don’t often get a phone call asking them to handle a load transporting a dead whale from one place to another. But that’s exactly what happened to one company way back in 1925. Apparently a whale had become beached on the Isle of Man and unfortunately it could not be saved. So the local haulage company was asked to remove it and carry it to the Manx Museum (you can see the skeleton of said whale at the museum if you pay it a visit today). While today you’d expect to see some kind of vehicular escort ahead of such a large load, back then it amounted to a policeman on a bicycle. How quaint – and how bizarre it must have looked! Obviously the journey was completed successfully, but it would have been a strange sight indeed. Creative thinking Even though this story dates back almost 90 years, it just goes to show how innovative and logical you need to be when you are asked to move such a big item from one place to another. Clearly it requires forward thinking – after all, you wouldn’t want to get stuck partway down the High Street with a dead whale, would you? It’s just these kinds of stories that remind us of the bizarre nature of the haulage industry at times. While most of the items transported from A to B each day are fairly straightforward and uninteresting, there are always those that stop and make us look and evaluate the industry we are in. So if you ever receive a phone call asking you if your company is able to move a large and possibly awkward item, just remember to check and see whether said item is a whale. Norman Dulwich is a Correspondent for Haulage Exchange, the leading online trade network for the road transport industry across the UK and Europe. It provides services for matching any return load and to buy and sell road transport and haulage work in the domestic and international markets.
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