Teletruks' reach allows workers to offload from one side of the wagon only.

Two JCB Teletruks are keeping the water flowing for Danone, the world's largest supplier of the bottled stuff.

Third-party logistics company DHL Logistics Group is using the forklifts at the railhead at the 310,000 square feet (28,799.9 square metre) National Distribution Centre in Coventry it operates for Danone.

Thanks to their long reach, the Teletruks take less than an hour to offload each rail wagon, enabling DHL to complete an entire train of almost 1,000 pallets in 16 hours.

Nick Tretis, general manager at DHL Logistics Group, says the telescopic boom allows the Teletruk to stand on the platform and reach pallets in the second row at the back of the wagon, allowing workers to offload from one side of the wagon only.

The distribution facility opened in January this year and holds some 38,000 pallets of mineral water of Danone Group's UK leading brands - Evian and Volvic.

The railhead allows stock to be shipped directly by train from Danone's production centre in France, helping reduce road freight.

Activity at the centre has picked up in the European summer, with deliveries rising from three a week in the off-season to daily services until August.

DHL uses the two LPG-powered model TLT 30G Teletruks to offload shrink-wrapped cube pallets, each weighing between 1 and 1.3 tonnes.

The wagons have been adapted specially for this application. There are two sets of double doors per wagon, each housing a section containing two rows of six pallets.

The JCB driver opens the wagon doors and scans the first face of pallets using a radio data terminal, which transmits back to the Warehouse Management System that product has been received. Pallets are then offloaded to a working area on the loading bay.

Once the front row is offloaded, the operation continues onto the rear row, where the Teletruk's reach comes to the fore.

With a maximum lift capacity of three tonnes, the JCB 30G TLT has a 1.5 tonne lift capacity at a two-metre forward reach.

Once a section has been offloaded, the FLT operator closes the doors and moves to the next section of the train.

From the platform loading bay, the pallets are collected by conventional counterbalance forklifts which take them to POD stations in the warehouse from where they are placed into racking.

DHL have been using JCB Teletruks for the last six years at a number of sites.