Readings after the fact
From yards that have used the sheets
These are not scores. They are what people said after they had lived with the plates for a month — including one yard that still argues with a catchment finger we refused to shorten.
They came to the Rustavi yard at six, before the first long-haul left, and stood at the gate with a pencil. The first draft put three of our regular runs on roads we had not used since winter. We had been briefing drivers from a map that was two seasons out of date.
The Tbilisi–Poti plate still hangs by the kettle. It is stained. The Tuesday weighbridge wait is the thing nobody can talk around any more.
Useful, though I wish they had been willing to round off the northern hole in our catchment. The river and the bridges are real, but the drawing makes the yard look as if we had abandoned those doors on purpose. We had not. We had just stopped going.
Harvest versus February on two sheets at the same scale ended an argument that had been running since my father kept the book. The 'quiet' yard in Gurjaani is a harvest yard. In February it is a room with a kettle. We staff it that way now.
A longer account: the bonded store that was not a hub
A forwarding desk in Poti asked for an operations mapping study because their Tbilisi partners kept speaking of the bonded store as a ‘hub’. The word had crept into weekly calls. On the ground, Giorgi’s gate notes showed trailers arriving for a single ship and leaving empty toward Senaki or back to the capital. Almost nothing fanned inland from that store except during the three days after a Caspian connection.
The draft plates were ugly in the way a truthful week is ugly. The client asked whether we could add arrows that suggested a hub. We said no. They paid the balance anyway, and used the sitting to change the call script with Tbilisi: the store is a ship’s waiting room, not a inland fan. That distinction, they wrote later, saved them from leasing a second Poti yard they did not need.
If you want a picture that matches a brochure, this office is a poor match. If you want the week as the gate saw it, write to us.