07-15-2011, 09:00 AM
Mark, it looks like you are off to a great start. You don't need a "story" to explain a "yard hustler." A busy industry will have one of even two or three "yard goats" to shift trailers around. Trucking companies won't pay drivers to sit at a customer's yard and shift trailers around for them. Typically, the truck driver will wait in line to get his trailer to the dock to load or unload, but really busy warehouses will have dozens of trailers parked waiting to be loaded, and they will use a warehouse owned tractor to move those trailers around. You can also have trucking company tractors and trailers around. Typically, the trailers that are shuttled by the warehouse driver will be empties waiting to be loaded, with a few that are loads waiting for unloading. For a bakery, most of their product will be shipped out by truck because the product is perishable and a truck is faster than the train because the driver can take it directly point to point without having to send it to a yard, have it switched into a train and then sent to another yard to be switched into a local delivery. However most big bakery complexes will receive flour in covered hoppers to be loaded into a silo. They will receive corn syrup in tank cars to be loaded into a tank (usually a vertical tank to save space), and assorted packaging and incidentals may come in in boxcars. In other words, your bakery could receive most of it's raw materials by rail, but would ship out it's finished products by truck.