Yale Materials Handling is supplying Alstom with reach trucks and counterbalance forklifts on a six-year contract.

Buckinghamshire-based forklift dealer Forkway is providing maintenance for a new fleet of Yale forklifts to help engineering firm Alstom's time-critical train service and repair operations run smoothly.

Alston undertakes regular train servicing and repair in UK sites that include Oxley, Chester, Glasgow, Wembley, Liverpool and Manchester, backed up by a central warehouse at Preston. Its customers include Virgin Trains, for which it carries out servicing and repairs at Wolverhampton and Manchester, as well as Northern Rail and Arriva, whose trains are serviced at Manchester and Chester, respectively.

In a deal worth in excess of GBP1 million (USD1.6 million), Yale Materials Handling is supplying Alstom with reach trucks and counterbalance forklifts on a six-year contract. The fleet includes MR14 reach trucks at the Preston warehouse, which work in narrow aisles to lift heights of around 6.5 m (21.3 ft.), and a variety of gas, electric and diesel-powered counterbalance trucks, used at various locations to load and unload goods vehicles and move components in and out of on-site stores.

The counterbalance forklift fleet includes the compact 3 T ERC30AGF, 3.5 T GDP35VX diesels, LPG powered GLP30VX and ERP35VL four-wheel electrics.

Due for imminent delivery to the Glasgow site are three ERP25VL electric four-wheel counterbalance trucks; while the Wembley site will soon take delivery of a 1.8 T, three-wheel ERP18VT.

The 3 T GLP30VX at the Oxley site has been fitted with a hydraulic fork spreader that allows the driver to extend the truck's 1,400 mm (4.6 ft.) long forks up to 1.9 m (6.2 ft.) for handling wide loads.

Alstom lead buyer Paul Crowley says the trucks are flexible and reliable. "They are also absolutely pivotal to maintaining the trains. At the end of the day, we just couldn't move the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) units around without the right forklifts.

"They're not the cheapest trucks on the market but they're the ones that fit what we require."

"We're very satisfied with the quality of these trucks and our maintenance agreement with Forkway makes it all hassle-free. We have a service level agreement in place that stipulates that if there is a breakdown, they have to respond within four hours," he adds.