Motorised Industrial Trucks

In a large warehouse, such as a mail processing centre or a central supply warehouse for a supermarket, hand pallet trucks – although useful – are limited. Typically a mail sorting warehouse has many shelves and racking materials amd needs massive floor space – and approximately twelve loading bays for loading and unloading. In this kind of environment where speed is of the essence motorised industrial trucks are vital.

The versatile and highly manoeuvrable powered pallet trucks have a seating area from which the operator steers the truck around the warehouse. The driver will pick up a steel open-topped cage containing sacks of mail and deliver them to a sorting area on the shop-floor from which the mail handlers then sort the sacks into empty cages around them according to the area they are to be mailed. All cages have space beneath them for the forks.

The fork-lift truck with its high weight-bearing capacity and vertical reach is used to stack the cages around the centre, this time on wooden pallets to ensure they are safely held in position. However, the smaller and lighter pallet truck is normally used to load and unload the delivery vehicles. Generally speaking, the pallet and fork-lift trucks’ batteries will hold a charge of roughly ten hours, enabling them to be in constant use throughout a working shift.

To ensure safety in areas where fork-lift trucks are in operation, warehouse pedestrians are required to wear high-visibility vests at all times, and steel toe-capped boots or shoes. In a typical mail processing centre, walkways are clearly marked out and workers should not stray from them without carefully checking for trucks first.