if any of you watch highway thru hell on national geographic,how the heck do they manage to actually rip the whole rear section off a trailer inc wheels,are our trailers better built than in the states,i have never seen a trailer in this country in an accident ripped in half,but you see it in the states,particularly when you see on you tube trains hitting them on crossings,i read somewhere that the trailers in the USA don’t have a chassis like our trailers,maybe there are drivers here who have lived/worked in the states who know,just interested after watching some of the wrecks those recovery blokes have to contend with on the programme
The trailer axles come off easy as they’re on a slider, I’ll take a photo tomorrow to show you just how weak they are compared to a European trailer.
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Most of them just look like aluminium tubes with barn doors at the back…
The side rail and cross members are the main structure of the trailer, break a couple of cross members and bend the side rail and it will fold up like a paper bag.
You can see the axle sliding subframe is also not exactly over engineered either, although they are up to the job until you start crashing into things. 
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Used to run with chassis-less box trailers from the UK too. TIP trailer rental had some. The company I used to work for bought some old ones, twin axles with a riveted alloy body. The axles were mounted on a fixed sub-frame. Putting a FULL load in them on Euro work made them creak and groan a lot, as did driving a forklift inside them.
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Yes I remember those, they had a subframe for the axles and landing gear, most box vans were like that as I remember, the Gray and Adams fridges with the little step in the sides were the same, a proper PITA to fit side boxes or spare wheel carriers to.
I know what you mean about weak floors too, we had some hanging garment step frames that got used on general groupage, they were no problem until you went to Italy, where a trailer is only loaded when they can’t fit anything else inside it.
Because of that the firm I pull for (and many others) get shot of them after 10yrs, as a lot of customers won’t load a trailer older than that. Even with new trailers you have to be careful if loading heavy stuff, I once loaded 21ton of nickel pellets on 7plts, three right over the pin and four over the trailer bogie, loaded straight down the middle and they would have kinked the trailer.
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