Another Shropshire tractor incident

[Sid]

65hp with a 20t digger on a low loader zero brakes....

Contractor bought a mahooosive slurry tanker locally, everyone was talking about how it would take some pulling around the hills of Devon.. my line would be, I'd be more worried about stopping the bloody thing than pulling it! Supposedly 50t fully loaded on triaxles.

 

[Tim G]

65hp with a 20t digger on a low loader zero brakes....

Looks like it would be safer (and quicker) to put the tractor on the trailer and pull it with the digger!

 

[Tarw Coch]

Contractor bought a mahooosive slurry tanker locally, everyone was talking about how it would take some pulling around the hills of Devon.. my line would be, I'd be more worried about stopping the bloody thing than pulling it! Supposedly 50t fully loaded on triaxles.

If the brakes are working as they should, stopping won’t be a problem on the road, if they’re not working as they should it’s another matter

 

[Tomr10]

whats the trailer weigh? its still the principal that its the combined weight that runs you over or helps you not take that corner pushing straight on.

Few buckets on there also

 

[steveR]

Contractor bought a mahooosive slurry tanker locally, everyone was talking about how it would take some pulling around the hills of Devon.. my line would be, I'd be more worried about stopping the bloody thing than pulling it! Supposedly 50t fully loaded on triaxles.

And bearing in mind the common theme of the Thread, how legal and safe is that outfit at 50t...?

As for putting it on the Land.... no thank you.

 

[Sid]

And bearing in mind the common theme of the Thread, how legal and safe is that outfit at 50t...?

As for putting it on the Land.... no thank you.

You don't have to fill it right up

Footprint is probably less than a 8 cube rotor spreader

 

[Tarw Coch]

You don't have to fill it right up

Footprint is probably less than a 8 cube rotor spreader

There is also the option of buying a much smaller and cheaper tanker that can operate within legal limits

Talking to the lads who do my umbilical work and they reckoned that somewhere they go had had one of these big tankers in and wouldn’t again as it had damaged the grass that much where it had been, their opinion was it was only good for arable land

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

There is also the option of buying a much smaller and cheaper tanker that can operate within legal limits

Talking to the lads who do my umbilical work and they reckoned that somewhere they go had had one of these big tankers in and wouldn’t again as it had damaged the grass that much where it had been, their opinion was it was only good for arable land

The land damage would be just the same, only the land gets cultivated afterwards (debatably doing even more damage) so it isn't as evident.

We had digestate spread on a silage field in 2018. Never again. The damage was horrific where the huge rig went. A shame as the product was ok.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

it was because I was bloody tired and the tidy polish bird with a nice bum walking on the pavement certainly didn’t help, needless to say writing a people carrier off right next to her didn’t impress.

Maybe tachos should be introduced if doing a lot of road running because it defo would have stopped what I did happening.

Refreshing honesty without any bragging, thanks.

I think you would be certain to overload the pick-up hitch. NFU-Mutual produce a brochure that says the legal limit for load on a pick-up hitch is 3 tons, but I've not been able to find the printed law on that. But certainly, the hitches fitted to most Deere's have a limit of 3 tons and surprisingly, the big Fendts are only 2 tons. There is a 16 ton capacity trailer currently being advertised on this site that has a loaded weight of 21.3 tons and puts a load of 6 tons on the tractor hitch. How can that be legal? I accept that if you operate within a ring fence you can do what you like - within reason - but overloading the hitch to twice or three times its design limit seems to be asking for trouble, and how many AD plants use only home produced feedstock?

Any accident causing serious injury or death would still be investigated by HSE and they'd prosecute for the overloaded hitch.

This is partly why these big trailers are allowed on the continent where they use hitches designed for the weight, not our UK type pickup hitches.

 

[Stewie]

Around here 30 cubic meter tankers are becoming the standard since the mother regulation has come into effect. No big problems if they are hitched on 200+ hp tractors AND you know what you are doing.
Personally I am more worried about the age of the drivers than the size of their trailers....not uncommon to see on Facebook a bunch of 18 y.o racing each other on tractors along main roads .

 

[Bongodog]

here police cars have number plate recognition cameras, so they only have to drive past a vehicle, the camera reads the plate & instantly lets them know if registration is current
Vehicle can’t be registered without our version of MOT or minimum compulsory third party insurance

Its no different here, problem is though that enforcement relies on Police detecting vehicles that shouldn't be on road and doing something about it, and cicvil servants chasing up unregistered vehicles.
Quite a while back the UK brought in a system whereby all vehicles have to be either registered for road use or registered as laid up and not in use (SORN) Seemingly the system is foolproof, but in practice it is fairly rubbish.

All number plates have to be made by an approved company who must put their details on the bottom of the plate, this is to stop cloning of numberplates and plates with incorrect spacings trying to spell out words other than what should be there. In practice our roads are full of illegally made incorrectly spaced numberplates with nothing being done about them. I have two retired police officers working for me, whilst following a car with an illegal numberplate I asked them if they would have pulled the car, the reply came back from one of them that his ambition when in the force was to pee off at least one member of the public a day and an incorrect numberplate especially on a flash car was too good an opportunity to let pass by. As he was an Inspector I'm fairly sure he expected his officers to also take action on such matters. I recall that there was a time when for quite a number of things such as this they used to issue a notice to attend a police station within 7 days to have your documents checked.

Without exception every retired police officer I know feels that the police service has lost its way, and senior management much prefer that tickets for minor offences and arrests are kept to the absolute minimum, we had a big problem with criminal damage in the village a couple of years back, the first reaction from the police was to send in PCSO's 8am - 5pm Monday to Friday, even after much uproar we never saw anyone above the rank of Sergeant. We had a public meeting attended by both our County Police Commissioner and our MP (A Govt Minister) even then the police wouldn't send anyone above the rank of Sergeant. It seems that the idea is that if you send a low ranking member of staff they can't commit you to anything, and can repeatedly push away questions by saying that they are above their pay grade.
In conclusion our Police are ineffective against most types of crime even what they see in front of them every day, the chances of them doing anything against tractors and trailers is as close to zero as you can get, a few years back locally a trailer full of potatoes ended up embedded in a village shop, anyone on here would have immediately seen that it was a case of gross overloading, never heard of a prosecution though.

 

[steveR]

You don't have to fill it right up

Footprint is probably less than a 8 cube rotor spreader

We ARE talking Contractors here aren't we...??

 

[Highland Mule]

We ARE talking Contrators here aren't we...??

He who pays the piper - the farmer is responsible too, and should be ensuring that the people he has working for him are doing the right thing.

 

[Tarw Coch]

Around here 30 cubic meter tankers are becoming the standard since the mother regulation has come into effect. No big problems if they are hitched on 200+ hp tractors AND you know what you are doing.
Personally I am more worried about the age of the drivers than the size of their trailers....not uncommon to see on Facebook a bunch of 18 y.o racing each other on tractors along main roads .

What is the relevance of mother regulations to this?
30 cube is 6,600 gallons by my reckoning, not sure about slurry but I think water weighs a ton a cube.
It’s that far beyond the law it’s blatantly taking the pish

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

What is the relevance of mother regulations to this?
30 cube is 6,600 gallons by my reckoning, not sure about slurry but I think water weighs a ton a cube.
It’s that far beyond the law it’s blatantly taking the pish

30 M3 is the equivalent of an HGV road tanker and should be treated as such (and definately kept off the land loaded).

 

[Christoph1945]

Way back in 1984, whilst I was based in communist Poland, pretty much everything pulled trailers; tractors, Ladas, little Fiats, occasionally push bikes and
motorbikes, and of course heavy good vehicles.

One dark and stormy winter evening, as I was leaving the old town of Torun, I was stuck in an east bound traffic hold up but oncoming traffic was moving considerably faster than our eastbound vehicles. Sitting and watching the rain battering the windscreen and listening to constant rhythm of the windscreen wipers my attention was taken by a large, oncoming, dark shadow trying to overtake one of the heavy goods trucks. Repeatedly the shadow moved over to the centre of the road and then quickly pulled back in behind the truck.

With the distance between us now down to tens of yards I could see that the dark shadow was actually a trailer that was trying to break away from the vehicle towing it and was not only drifting my way but was starting to cross over the centre of the road and was making a beeline for me and I had nowhere to go. With panic starting to rise in my mind and my heart thumping in my chest I was pretty well resigned to the impact when when the oncoming picked up speed, as did the lorry and trailer, and the ominous shadow was pulled back into line. Double checked my undies for skid-marks later.

I do think that sometimes drivers slip into autopilot mode and forget that they are pulling a trailer.

 

[Stewie]

What is the relevance of mother regulations to this?
30 cube is 6,600 gallons by my reckoning, not sure about slurry but I think water weighs a ton a cube.
It’s that far beyond the law it’s blatantly taking the pish

I am not in the Uk. Apparently here the old limit of 20 tons for trailer weight is now 36 tons for 4-axles. I was just commenting from a practical point of view, clearly the law is law.

 

[d williams]

30 M3 is the equivalent of an HGV road tanker and should be treated as such (and definately kept off the land loaded).

Artics delivery here some can only carry 27 m3 will depend on their rare wt

 

[essexpete]

It is quite hard to see how that happened. The tractor would if, anything, have been heading, away from the cottage with the bend just rounded? Perhaps over compensation post bend or lack of concentration. I suppose I should not speculate.

 

[Sid]

Of course the general public are 100% legal!!!