Stertil Dock has installed a series of eight loading bays for Royal Mail Group Limited as part of an exclusive supplier three-year contract. The installation, which supports the Mail Centre at Strood in Kent, is the latest project undertaken to accommodate the Group’s ever-widening range of road vehicles.
Opened in 2012, the state-of-the-art 15,400m² Mail Centre occupies a 5.4 hectares site on the edge of Strood town centre with easy access from the nearby M2 motorway. The Centre has been designed to incorporate the latest environmentally sustainable technologies incorporating such features as rooflights, a solar wall, rainwater harvesting and a biomass boiler. The use of highly-automated sorting equipment enables the Centre to process over three million mail items every day at sortation speeds of up to 40,000 items an hour.
To support this highly efficient operation, Stertil Dock supplied and installed a series of eight loading bays to speed the loading and unloading of a diverse range of vans, trucks and lorries including the Centre’s fleet of double deck trailers each of which carry loads of up to 92 Royal Mail roll cages.
The Stertil Dock installation incorporates an extensive array of products from the company’s range of loading bay equipment including eight tonne capacity X Series telescopic dock levellers, WIS shelters, sectional overhead doors, composite control panels, dock lights, traffic lights and wheel guides.
The X Series dock leveller includes an unusually long 600mm telescopic lip which extends in line with the platform. Precise control of this extension allows it to be placed accurately onto the rear of a vehicle deck so that vehicles can be fully loaded right up to the rear door thereby maximising the use of available space. Simple push buttons control all movement of the dock levellers and, when loading and unloading operations are completed, an ‘auto park’ button returns the platform and lip automatically to its parked position.
Royal Mail’s WIS dock shelters incorporate robust side curtains and an inflatable head curtain to provide an excellent seal between vehicles and the loading dock. This ensures that road transport of all heights, even double deck vehicles, can be safely accommodated whilst helping to preserve the internal temperature within the building. In addition, one of the eight loading bays features a 5.6 metres tall WIS shelter to support the loading and unloading of special high-roof UK Mail vehicles.
Commenting on the installation, Richard Amey, Stertil Dock’s Royal Mail account manager, says, “The site at Strood is extremely high tech with a strong focus on environmental sustainability and we’re delighted to have been involved with such a prestigious project. As the latest undertaking covered by our three year exclusive supplier contract with Royal Mail, it’s been one of the most satisfying. I believe that the range of equipment we’ve installed truly complements the modern building and will prove to be not only aesthetically pleasing but also extremely effective and reliable.”
