This has no doubt been asked before but, i was on he M-Way on saturday ans saw a number of these. I noticed 80% of the ones i saw was on container work. Now, since i dont do container work you will have to bear with me. The containers i saw them pulling look like between 40 and 45 ft long, but i thought the longest they could pull was 20ft (small containers) because of the bonnet. The main questions are as follows:
a) Is the container classed as the trailer or is it classed (like my Excavators etc) as a ‘load’?
b) What is the MAXIMUM lengh container they can carry and whats the longest trailer they can pull behind them?
As far as I know, long nose Scannies can pull a 40 footer but not a 45.
I heard that the length rules that stopped them pulling 45 footers had been changed slightly, which mean they can now pull them. But I haven’t been able to find anything official, confirming that.
i may be talking out of my ‘arris on this one and i can’t confirm the legality of it but here goes :- when i worked for brain haulage in the 80’s we started pulling some of the first 45’ boxes in this country for maersk line. the whole thing revolved around the overall length of the combo and to enable us to do this, brains bought a load of shorter wheelbase tractor units with cab top sleepers (or maisonettes as they were referred to). then somebody pointed out that, as the container was the load, as long as the overall length of tractor & trailer (all 40’ max) was within the law you could have a normal sleeper cab unit. i do recall that as t-cab scannys and the like were , however, longer wheelbase they could only pull 20 & 30 skels (i remember brian o’connor at widnes running one and with a 20’ skel it looked stupid to me) i think now, with longer overall combo length they must be “in scope”. the important thing is that the length of the container, as it is the load, is to some extent, not important.