November 8, 2017

Our European Truck Company is now moving forwards at an accelerating pace. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, we have been earning skill points which have increased our potential earnings on each trip by making longer journeys available along with more valuable cargoes. The second reason is our employee. Lets have a quick look at how this pans out.

It took fourteen trips after buying our garage in Bordeaux before we could afford a second truck and to hire an employee. It has only taken seven trips in since then to reach the point where I’m ready to buy another new truck and hire a second employee. I should allow for the difference in cost of the trucks involved since the MAN TGX with its 6×2/4 midlift chassis did cost about €65k more than our 4×2 Volvo. But by the time I got to a Volvo dealer to buy the third truck we had €258k in the bank which could have bought two new Volvo’s! That’s significantly more money being made over a short time.

In the trips leading up to buying the MAN TGX I averaged €16K per job. In the TGX I have been earning an average of €27K per job. That’s because I’ve been able to concentrate on longer trips and higher paying cargoes – there’s no fewer than five flammable liquid ADR jobs in there which highlights the way that ADR skills enhance your company’s earnings! Here we are passing through Vimoutiers with a load of Kerosene bound for Le Havre…It’s good to see a Waberer’s MAN tagging along as I do see their vehicles quite often in London on deliveries.

Here’s another load of Fuel but this time in a container on the way to Groningen. You’ll guess from the windmill in the background that I’m in Holland though exactly where I haven’t been able to identify. It’s almost certainly somewhere between Eindhoven and Venlo (neither of which are currently reproduced in the game)…
And back in France with (you’ve guessed) a load of Fuel Oil from Calais to Le Mans, here seen crossing the Pont de Brotonne…

But the earnings from the ADR runs alone do not explain where all the money has come from. To understand, we need to look at what Freja has been up to…You can see from the screen shot that she has been doing lots of trips in western France shifting a variety of cargoes and adding to her skill set as she goes. She’s now making the company a daily profit of €4K after her wages have been paid. And that’s what having employees does for your bottom line in this game!

After dropping a load of Transmissions to Marseille I had enough money in the bank to safely buy our third truck with around €50k left over. I needed a job to Limoges to visit the Volvo dealer but there wasn’t one. Time to cheat a little – and I do mean a little. I happen to know from my main profile that there is another Volvo dealer in Luxembourg. In game terms that’s close to our Lyon garage, so I picked up a load of Motor Oil and went there. I bought another Volvo of the same specification as our existing truck and asked the dealer to deliver it to Lyon where the single slot was empty from when I relocated myself to Bordeaux. Then I hired another driver.

I picked up a short haul load of Vodka bound for Düsseldorf in a Refrigerated Ballantine’s trailer. Quite why a load of bottled Vodka needs to be kept chilled I don’t know – perhaps they were planning on serving it off the tailgate 😉 We crossed the Rhine on the Rodenkirchener Brücke…
After completing the delivery I was able to check on how our new employee is settling in at Lyon. Meet Marcel…As you can see he has his first job in the log. Unlike Freja he didn’t have a distance point but an ADR along with High Value cargo and Just in Time Delivery are good skills to start with. In fact the Road Roller will have required that High Value skill 🙂

So there we are – two employees and lots of cash coming in. I’ll be in a position to purchase another garage very soon. I have my eye on Montpellier as the likely choice. That will give us a triangle of depots in the Southern area of France. Then perhaps a Garage in Paris to make it a diamond of depots? I’ll continue driving the TGX for the time being as we build up the basic Volvo fleet and I’ll take another look at the Renault Range T in my main profile to see if I can overcome the issues I experienced with it. Until next time… Happy Trucking 🙂