Haulage History – Getting Loads From A to B

If you had been around centuries ago and you’d got into the business of transportation, you obviously wouldn’t have had the luxury of a nice cab in a lorry to drive around in to get from place to place. Your mode of transport back then would have been the original and the best – Shank’s Pony. Yes, your own two feet would be responsible for delivering loads from one place to another, and you wouldn’t be travelling hundreds of miles a day either. How things have changed.

Fortunately, humans back then were equally as resourceful as they are today. It wasn’t too long before they started looking for another way to transport things other than by their own two feet. Horses were used to carry loads of various sizes, although even then there were limits on what they could carry. It’s quite something to compare these early efforts in transportation to what we have today.

The Romans revolutionise transport

You probably already know we have a lot to thank the Romans for – not least the roads they became quite efficient at building. They started building them in around 500BC and they had one thought in mind when they did so – to make it easier to carry loads of goods from one place to another. They were so keen on developing these roads that they tried to stick to straight lines where possible, even if it meant carving a path right through the middle of a hill. Their roads were in far better condition than the muddier and bumpier tracks that had been the only option to use until then.

The turn of the 17th century and beyond

Unfortunately when Rome fell so did the fate of the Roman roads they’d left us with. For a while it seemed as if the road network for transporting loads around Britain was going to fail us. We had to wait until the 17th century to see more significant advances in the road network, and these improvements continued into the 18th century and beyond.

Nowadays, when we have so many means of transport available to us, it has become far easier to transport goods from place to place. A lorry can take a load to a plane or train, unload it and that same cargo can be in another part of the country entirely by the next day. Indeed it could even be in a different country altogether. Doesn’t it make you glad you work in the haulage industry in the 21st century, rather than in Roman times or even earlier?

Still we have much to thank the Romans for, and indeed the primitive humans who invented the wheel and developed various ways of getting goods from A to B. Whatever role you play in the haulage industry today, you can be sure it would have been far more challenging in centuries gone by.