Shunt trucks essential to industry
Trailer caddy gives businesses an option to move goods and free up doors in warehouses
There’s a part of my industry the non-trucking population is not aware of. No reason to even consider it, but without it the trucking biz would ground to a halt, or at least, slow down to a crawl as far as movement of goods are concerned.
I’m referring to yard dogs, yard tractors, yard hostlers, shunt trucks. They go by many names, but essentially what they are is a single two-axle unit with the sole task to move trailers around the yard.
These units are butt ugly. A steering axle over which sits a small cab with super oversized windows. Looks like a square fish bowl. The very powerful engine is right below the cab. They look like something designed back in the ’50s but as looks are not what matter in this case why bother fixing something that is not broken, right?
Nothing special inside for the driver. It’s an all-business cab. The exhaust stack is right beside the fullsized sliding glass door, which the driver will use countless times an hour if in a normal application.
Outside is a small platform upon which is the coupling device, the fifth wheel that is directly over the real axle. That’s it, other than brake and headlights, a heater and windshield wipers, and a two-way radio/ communications unit.
Running a warehouse requires space. Goods coming and going by trucks. That’s done through doors or bays in the warehouse. If a trailer is loaded or empty, and isn’t moving, that is lost revenue. Warehousemen can’t work, and time is being wasted.
And so the shunt truck driver is called to move that trailer out and put another one in its place. Then business continues.
Yards with companies that figure they can survive without a shunt vehicle soon discover the errors of that thinking. I know of one company whose back east management figured the best way to keep their warehouse busy and productive was to move into a bigger facility with more doors. That didn’t work well for long.
And throwing a spanner into the works further for that way of thinking are the newly mandated electronic log devices that record every single nano-second a semi-tractor is fired up. Suddenly, before the expected time for use of that unit, it will be illegal to run down the road as hours of operation have been used “up.”
That aforementioned company took the 1950s easy way out and used any truck in the yard to move the trailer in and out of a warehouse door. Welcome to the 21st century. Big Brother is watching and recording and reporting.
For such companies there’s a new option they should consider before they check out moving to yet another larger warehouse. It’s a fairly new design called a ‘trailer Caddy.’ Tree huggers will love it too. It’s a plug-in electric unit that can be operated by almost anyone. It’s similar to a ‘power jack,’ a piece of equipment used inside most warehouses to move pallets of goods around. The trailer caddy does the same thing, same principle, by hooking up to the 5th wheel pin of the trailer and push or pull the trailer around the yard by a worker who has some common sense and is given just a minimum of practice.
This relatively new innovation is more useful in smaller yards where a shunt truck would be over-kill. It will free up or fill a door so the economy of the warehouse continues uninterrupted. Also, the tractor trailer power unit will not be lost to road service by it’s overuse of hours available by having been shanghaied to do yard duty.
A somewhat simple win-win situation in our ever-changing industry. One thing is for certain. For every change the suits and skirts force onto our workplace, another new one needs to be employed to counter balance. Lots of money being spent in 2018 to continue what we were doing so well just a few short years ago.
If it wasn’t broken then, why does it need fixing now?