Asda has just taken delivery of the triaxle, stepframe trailer vans, which have twin moving, hydraulic decks. They were designed and built by Cartwright's to meet the specific needs Asda had for its clothing distribution.

The trailers will be based at Asda's sites in Northampton, Wigan, Stoke-on-Trent and Washington and will move product between all clothing DC's.

Asda asked Cartwright's to design a trailer that would have the absolute maximum carrying capacity. The supermarket company took eight double-deck trailers from Cartwright's rental fleet on trial while detailed discussions continued about Asda's design request.

When Cartwright's had completed the design for Asda, the retailer placed an order for ten. All ten were built at the Cartwright's base in Altrincham before being delivered to Asda sites in recent weeks.

Asda's network transport manager, Chris Hall, believes that working with Cartwright's ensured that he was able to obtain the best possible trailer for the job.

He said: "These trailers have been very much designed in response to our specific requests.

"As we are dealing with the transporting of clothing, which is very light, we do not have issues relating to the risk of running overweight. So we were looking for ways to maximise the use of a trailer's cubic capacity.

"What Cartwright's have designed for us has pretty much doubled our trailer capacity.''

Cartwright director Steven Cartwright said his company had designed the trailers to accommodate both roll cages, rolling rails and pallet use, maximising the total cubic capacity by utilising two hydraulic moving decks - one over the foredeck and one over the rear deck. This enables pallets to be loaded on both decks over the foredeck area.

Chris Hall added: "Cartwright's have supplied trailers for our clothing network for the past five years and we have always found their products to be well designed, well built & reliable.

"Their responsiveness to customers' needs and their initiative in coming up with solutions have always been excellent.''