Now BRS rents trailers
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BRITISH Road Services have entered the trailer rental business with the launching of its BRS Trailer Rental service in London last week.
BRS sees it as a "natural evolution of the truck rental service" and initially it has a total of 100 trailers based at four depots. It is envisaged that this will expand to around 2,000 trailers at 20 depots in the next five years.
The first four depots are at Brentford, Derby, Coventry and Wigan, all existing BRS Truck Rental depots. Four types of trailers are available: box vans, curtain-siders, flats and platform skeletals. All are new 12.2m (40ft) tandem-axle trailers by Craven Tasker or Crane Fruehauf.
BRS plans to widen the range of trailers available for rental to include more specialised ones such as refrigerated vans and shorter trailers.
Examples of rates are: £15 per day for a 40ft box van and £9 per day for a 40ft flat.
Rates include delivery of the trailer to the customer and picking it up again after rental. Trailers are automatically covered by the BRS Rescue service. Mike Latham, who was mainly responsible for the development of the BRS Trailer Rental service, explained that following a two-year pilot study by Western BRS and a detailed examination of existing rental services, BRS decided to invest an initial £1.2m on purchase of trailers and establishing the first four depots "where there was a known demand for trailer rental."
Mr Latham said that customer response to the service would determine how quickly and where more trailer rental depots would be established.