Container delivery and access — what the truck actually needs

The four measurements

Every container delivery in the country reduces to four questions. Have those four answers ready when you ring and the quote comes back straighter, the right truck gets booked, and the container lands the day it was meant to.

1. Run-in length. How much straight, reasonably level space there is behind the spot where the container will sit.
2. Width at the pinch point. The narrowest single spot anywhere along the route in, not the width the driveway manages on average.
3. Headroom. Everything overhead along the route and above the spot, and the extra clearance the truck needs while it is working.
4. Ground bearing. Whether the surface carries a loaded truck without rutting, and separately whether the spot carries the container through four small castings.

Three of those are tape measure jobs. The fourth is a judgement call, and it is the one that comes back to bite people months later.

Run-in length

A tilt-tray delivers by raising its bed and letting the container slide off backwards while the truck creeps forward from under it. The truck has to end up somewhere while that happens, so the space you need is the vehicle, the box and a working margin on top.

For a 20ft that is roughly twenty metres of clear straight run. For a 10ft, around half that. For a 40ft on a tilt-tray you are asking for a lot of straight ground and a lot of sites simply do not have it, which is one of the reasons 40fts more often go on a side loader or a crane truck. The 40ft page covers that in more detail.

Straight matters as much as long. A run-in with a dog-leg in it is not a run-in. If the truck has to turn while the container is coming off, it is not going to happen.

Width at the pinch point

Walk the route from the road to the spot and find the tightest place along it. Average width tells you nothing; the squeeze is what counts. It is usually a pair of gate posts, sometimes a letterbox against a retaining wall, occasionally a neighbour's car that lives in the same spot every day.

Allow around 4.3 metres of clear working width for a tilt-tray. That is wider than the vehicle, because the bed has to tilt and the box swings a little before it settles. A side loader working alongside itself wants more again, and a crane truck needs room for stabiliser legs that reach out well past the body on both sides.

Measure between the hard things, not the soft ones. Grass and shrubs can be driven over. Fence posts, gas meters, brick piers, water meters and stormwater grates cannot.

Headroom

This is the one people forget because they never look up. Power and telephone lines across the driveway, tree limbs, carport beams, verandah eaves, awnings, shade sails, a low branch that has grown since last summer.

Mid-delivery clearance is the number that matters, and it is well above the finished height of the unit. A tilt-tray raises its bed steeply before anything slides, so the rear top corner of the box travels through a much higher arc than where it ends up. A crane truck needs open air along everything the boom sweeps through, not merely above the final position.

Overhead power is the one to be honest about. If the service line to the house crosses the route, say so at quote time. It is not automatically a problem, but it changes what truck comes, and finding out on the day means the truck goes home loaded.

Ground bearing — the one that comes back later

Two separate questions hide inside this one, and the second gets skipped almost every time.

The first is whether the ground carries a loaded truck. A truck with a container on it is heavy, and it concentrates that weight on a small number of tyres. Lawn after a wet week, fresh fill, a sand pad, a new driveway that has not cured, a septic trench, a rainwater tank lid, a stormwater pit — all of these will look fine and will not be fine.

The second is whether the spot carries the container once the truck has gone. An empty 20ft is a bit over two tonne, and all of it comes down through four castings whose footprint is roughly that of a house brick laid flat. Concentrate that much weight into that little area and ground which took the truck happily will still let one corner settle twenty millimetres over the following few months.

What you notice is the doors, and the container gets the blame. Once the door end is out of square the locking bars will not seat, and almost always the box is perfectly sound while one corner has quietly dropped. Four pads set under the corner positions and roughly levelled before the truck arrives heads the whole thing off.

The three trucks

Tilt-tray

The workhorse for 10ft and 20ft deliveries. Cheapest to run, most available, and the right answer for most suburban and rural blocks with a decent driveway. Needs the run-in described above, needs the width, and needs ground it will not sink into. Places the container behind itself, in line with the truck.

Side loader

A purpose-built trailer carrying a pair of hydraulic lifting cranes along its length. It picks the container up off its own deck and lowers it onto the ground alongside — always off the right-hand side, the driver's side. More side loader jobs turn on that one fact than on anything else, because the vehicle has to be able to park with its driver's side presented to the placement spot.

On a two-way street that usually means the truck sits on the far side of the road, or comes in from the other direction. On a one-way street or a divided road it can mean the container cannot be placed from the kerb at all without a lane closure. Down a driveway it means the driveway has to be approached from the side that puts the spot on the driver's side.

What a side loader does not need is a long run-in. It needs a stable, level stretch beside the placement spot roughly as long as the trailer, ground that will carry the stabiliser legs, and clear air above. It handles 40fts routinely and it can stack, which a tilt-tray cannot.

Crane truck

A rigid truck with a hydraulic knuckle boom behind the cab. The container travels on the deck and the boom lifts it off, over the side or over the rear. No run-in is required at all. What it does want is a place to stand near the site, firm footing for the stabiliser legs, and nothing in the air between it and where the box is going.

That is why it solves sites which look hopeless. Terrace streets parked out on both kerbs. A rear yard with a house in front of it and no vehicle way through. Short steep drives, courtyards, cramped industrial lots, and every job where the unit has to travel over a fence instead of through a gateway. The catch is reach: lifting capacity drops away sharply the further out the boom goes, so distance from the truck decides how much weight can be handled and sometimes decides that it cannot.

Empty and loaded are different jobs

A container delivered empty and the same container collected loaded are not the same delivery, and this catches people out at the end of a hire or a move.

An empty 20ft is a bit over two tonne. Fill it with household goods and it can be five or six. Fill it with anything dense — tiles, pavers, machinery, steel, a workshop's worth of tooling — and it can be well past that. The truck that put it there empty may not be able to pick it up loaded. A crane truck in particular has a lift rating that drops sharply with reach, and a load that was easy at three metres may be impossible at seven.

Ground bearing changes too. A pad that carried an empty container through a dry winter can pump and rut under a loaded one after a wet fortnight, and the truck has to drive on it. If you are hiring, tell us at the start what is going in it, so the collection is planned for the weight rather than discovered at it. The delivery page sets out how that works.

The three photographs

Nearly every access question in the country gets answered by three phone photos. Take them before you ring and you will save a site visit.

1. From the road, looking in. Stand on the footpath or the verge at the driveway or gate and shoot straight up the access. This shows the entry width, the gradient, the gutter crossover and any overhead line at the boundary.
2. From the placement spot, looking back out. Stand where the container will sit and shoot back the way the truck has to come. This is the shot that shows the trees, the turn, the shed corner and the fence you cannot see from the street.
3. The spot itself, wide. Step back far enough to get the ground, what is on either side and what is above. This shows surface, slope, drainage fall and clearance.

Send those three through the contact page or text them, and a real person will tell you which truck suits and whether anything needs moving first. If we can see it, we can plan it — and if we cannot, we will say that too.

Things worth doing before the day

• Move vehicles, trailers and bins off the route the night before, not the morning of.
• Cut back the low limb. It always takes ten minutes and it always would have been the problem.
• Mark the exact spot with pegs or paint so nobody is guessing which way the doors face. Decide which end the doors go — it is a great deal easier now than later.
• Have someone on site who can make a decision. Not a decision about millimetres, a decision about where it goes if the first plan does not work.
• If it has rained heavily in the last few days and the last stretch is unsealed, ring us. Rescheduling a day is nothing. Bogging a truck on your block is not.

Not sure what you need? Ring 0477 410 500 and describe the site. How it works sets out the rest of the process from quote to placement.