Lucy:
I’ve just been talking to Rikki, as it goes. All six of his current trailer axles are both positive and command steered.I think the thing you also forget, and which you can’t get through technical knowledge, no matter where it came from, is that the official name and the vernacular are often quite different things. I know some of the things we talked about in Short Sea shipping confused me when I first moved onto it from Deep Sea, for example. The first time I was told go and load a Jumbo I was too embarrassed to admit I’d never heard of one, never mind the “Tinsley or Bell” I was being told to load it on…
But that’s the difference between book learning and hands on experience, a trap we as journalists have to beware falling into.
To put it simply if drivers think that the type of ‘rear steer’ axle that just supports and tracks the overhang, created by the fixed axles ahead of it, is there to help them regarding reducing or cancelling the resulting tail sweep, as opposed to it might as well not even be there in that regard,
then we’ve got a big safety issue with the van crash topic being the alarm bell.