IT may be a tough time for independent garages, but North Yorkshire-based Tyke Petroleum is managing to lead by example.

The firm, which operates a dozen garages across Yorkshire from its base in Malton, has bucked the trend of hard times, and has now acquired a new garage.

Managing director Derek Boorman said the purchase of the former Polar Ford garage in Norton, showed how the firm was soaking up the pressure of the current climate, which has seen many small garages having to sell up.

"It would be foolish to pretend it's getting any easier," Mr Boorman added.

"But it is worse for garages which perhaps only sell a few thousand litres a week than it is for us. We have the advantage of having a range of sites, and that does help us."

The scale of the operation, Mr Boorman added, was all-important.

"It's true that the big petrol companies are no longer that interested in the smaller garages, and we have had to respond to that," he said.

"We can now only buy sites with a very large turnover."

The new garage will sell Jet petrol, and is close to the firm's existing Malton garage, which sells Total.

The firm has also just come to the end of its licence to run a garage in Fulford Road in York, which it has been managing for Total on a temporary basis since selling its Piccadilly site to make way for the Travelodge development.

"We did what was quite a rare thing for us; we took out a licence to run the Fulford garage for Total," said Mr Boorman.

"We don't normally run garages that we don't own. But we did that because, moving out of Piccadilly, we wanted to offer a continued service to our credit customers who used that garage, and also because we did not want to make the staff from Piccadilly redundant.

"We moved our staff across to Fulford, and managed to do both those things."

This week, though, Tyke handed the Fulford garage back to Total, with the Tyke staff keeping their positions.