It really is nice and simple.
Live loading is your trailer being loaded after you arrive. No need to drop the trailer.
Drop and Swap is pulling into a yard, dropping your current trailer, hitching to a new one and taking that out with a load already on it.
Trailer change is where you meet up with a bloke in a layby, MSA or industrial estate. He takes yours, you take his, and away you go. Muckles, do with that what you will.
(Tone Lowering Alert, Tone Lowering Alert.)
Mike-C:
jessicas dad:
merc0447:
Instead of picking up a stand trailer, you get live loaded so you go out with the same trailer you came in with, well thats what it means with my company.Exactly this.
Thats my interpretation too.
This is correct. Your unit stays under the trl you have on.
The term is most often used at companies that have a policy of not live loading. i.e. normally drop & swop using their own tugs to move trailers on & off bays or in & out of sheds. Occasionally, if they are wanting to get a certain load away (to meet a ferry perhaps) and you are there to collect it, they will make that exception and “live load” it.
P&G Thurrock might be an example?
To be honest in 40 years of road transport I have never heard of it. Denis Fuller may have done with his cattle truck. I started out with a fellmonger and that was definitely dead loading 
Bus driving?
Retired Old ■■■■:
Bus driving?
Thats “self loading”