JST Services has come up with a few innovative ways of collecting logs from difficult areas.

Many countries and companies across the globe have to go to increasingly inaccessible places to access timber. In many cases the road infrastructure was designed with smaller and lighter vehicles in mind. The age of increasingly larger trucks designed for hardened roads is upon us. This results in increased road expenditure to get these trucks closer to the log collection point, or ferrying the timber to a point where the logs can be reached. These conventional trucks also result in rutting of forest roads in the wheel tracks, leading to additional road maintenance and expenditure.

        

JST Services is a British company specialising in using log transport vehicles that can travel on forest roads that would normally be inaccessible to normal highway trucks. These log trucks have much lower ground pressures than conventional trucks, as they have multiple wheels strategically placed on the trailers to lower ground pressures to less than half of conventional vehicles. The trucks can still carry large payloads, but are designed to only work off-road, yet reducing damage to forest roads and therefore reducing road expenditure. The trailers can either be pulled by a large agricultural tractor, or a five wheeled rigid tractor with a drawbar trailer or a conventional all-wheel-drive rigid truck with a drawbar trailer, where the rear axles of the trailer have evenly distributed wheels. For a presentation that clearly shows the different vehicle configurations, see “In-forest vehicles by John Scott” at http://www.roadex.org/index.php/services/partner-knowledge-bank/scotland/ and www.jstservices.co.uk