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DOUBLING UP ON TRAILERS
Page 43
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Ask David Sheppard what his greatest innovation has been during his 39 years at John Lewis and he says: "The biggest one for me was actually designing and having built the first double-deck trailer in 1986, I'm not talking double-stacking, I'm talking about a proper walk-in, double-deck trailer with two full decks."
Getting one made wasn't easy. "I had to force Craven Tasker to build one. They thought I was mad. They thought it would fail over! But I've got a long love of buses so I knew how double-deckers were designed and I had the double-deck trailer built as a monocoque.
"I had to get prototype fully-independent air suspension from Rubery-Owen because of the height and once we'd got it built, we then had to increase the door height because we couldn't [get] it out of the factory."
However, Sheppard reports there were still some doubters. The people from Rubery-Owen and Craven Tasker followed us all the way to Edinburgh with 'it. They thought it would fall over at the first roundabout, but of course it never did.
"We had about 50 of them in all. It was a great success. It increased our rollcage capacity from 33 to 57."
Since the pioneering days of the 80s, the double-deck concept has been constantly developed. "The team out there has taken it to greater heights," says Sheppard. "We designed what we call the multidekker, which had four decks. It was designed in-house here."
Sheppard even had a hand in naming it. it comes from the Bristol Lodekker bus. I happen to own a Lodekker and that's why we gave it the name multidekker." When he sees a double-deck trailer on the motorway, how does he feel? Sheppard answers: "I feel quite proud of it to be honest. We've currently got somewhere in the region of 170 out of a trailer fleet of about 500 and we're now dabbling with them on the Waitrose side,"