History
In 2010, Arnold Spedition can look back on more than 60 years of history. The foundation of the family business was laid in 1947 by Ernst Arnold when he bought a wood gas powered Citroen platform truck. The entrepreneur, born in 1920 and a machine fitter and mechanic by trade, had returned from Upper Austria to Rimpar near Würzburg with his wife and his son, Horst, in 1946. Shortly afterwards, he bought his first lorries, a platform lorry and a Lancia tip lorry. The tip lorry was converted and used to carry urgently needed charcoal from Würzburg to Rimpar.
Ernst Arnold quickly recognized the business potential in transportation services and added more lorries to his small fleet. These included an MAN tip lorry which he used to drive sugar beets to the closest sugar mill for local farmers. Horst Arnold, who was to take over the family firm later, helped to service and repair the lorries in the firm’s repair workshop. More trucks were added to the fleet, including the first silo trucks, which were used to execute orders for one of our then customers, the cement manufacturer Schwenk Zement.
After Ernst Arnold died in an accident on 3 November 1973, his son Horst became the firm’s managing director. He is still a shareholder of the Arnold Group. In 1974, he dispatched some of the company trucks for the first time on international routes, and the Near and Middle East were increasingly gaining in importance for the business. An office was built on new premises in Rimpar, away from the family residence.
In the mid-seventies, Philipp Holzmann, one of Arnold Spedition’s major customers, built an airport in the Saudi Arabian cities of Jeddah and Rijhad. Since then, our trucks – loaded with construction materials – have been rolling from Germany via Turkey and Iraq all the way to Saudi Arabia. There, the forwarder founded a branch with its own fleet of trucks. At the same time, the family business extended its organizational structure as a carrier and forwarder far beyond the borders of Europe.
In the early nineties, the current managing director, Oliver Arnold, began his apprenticeship as a shipping specialist in Frankfurt. Afterwards, he acquired practical experience at the Rimpar headquarters for several years before spending some time in Turkey to establish and expand the firm’s international forwarding business, in particular the transport business from Western Europe to Turkey, Greece and Rumania.
By that time, Arnold had become the second largest European – and the largest German – carrier on these routes with its own fleet of trucks. After founding a branch office in Istanbul, Oliver Arnold was able to restructure – with the help of a fleet of more than 170 semitrailers - the company’s hauling service to and from Turkey, making it even more efficient.
From Abu Dhabi to Vietnam for Internationally Known Companies
Machines and high tech goods were transported from Europe to Turkey whereas on the way back the trucks usually carried textiles and hazelnuts. As we had our own textiles inspection and distributing stations, we were able to secure hauling contracts from big textiles importers like Kik, Takko and C&A. Several thousand tonnes of hazelnuts were trucked every year for customers in the food industry like Kraft, Jakobs Suchard, Ritter Sport and Ferrero. Via the port of Trieste, a regular RoRo transport service was established for internationally known customers like Opel, Mercedes and BASF.
In the late nineties, the challenges on project management in heavy hauling in all parts of the world began to increase. Road surveys and the use of their results have been increasingly gaining in importance for future power plant operators and machine construction firms.
Today, the project forwarder Arnold Schwerlast GmbH & Co. KG specializes in heavy and specialized hauling in all parts of the world as well as logistical handling. Cargo with a unit weight of up to 800 tonnes and straddle carriers that are almost 30 meters high are loaded by full charter onto ocean-going vessels that travel from Abu Dhabi to Rumania or Vietnam, to name just a few examples. Our international contacts and long-standing business relationships form the basis of our international transportation business, carrying goods to all parts of the world by land, sea and air.
Today, highly complex operations require the use of specialized machines and a fleet of specialized trucks. These are used wherever a customer builds or sells something. Today, our knowledge of the best possible routes and the ideal means of transport for each country make us a project forwarder of great flexibility.