There are always plenty of these simple, but vital skeletal (skeleton, skel, skellie, skelly etc.) trailers for sale in the UK. Unlike continental European operators, the UK almost exclusively uses 45ft container semi-trailers for the ISO containers. With twistlocks (manual and automatic) set for both a pair of 20ft containers or one 30ft or 45ft container, this gives supreme flexibility. There are also plenty of skellie with sliding twistlock mountings – a ‘sliding skelly’ as they are commonly known. It is therefore rare that you will see a skeletal truck for sale in right hand drive in this country. The skeletal container trailers are just that – the bare bones of a trailer chassis with fixing points (twistlocks) on each corner and in the centre to hold the shipping containers in place.
These unassuming trailers move the huge amounts of incoming shipping containers from the docks across the UK. There are some skeletal trailers that have been fitted with cranes so they are able to unload the containers themselves – which means that there is no large crane or forklift required at the delivery point.
There is a wide choice of manufacturers in the used skeletal trailer market. The most common makes on Truckpages are SDC and Dennison with Fruehauf and Montracon in third and fourth place.
In order to move lots of trailers around the country and export them more economically, it is possible to stack a whole series of skeletal trailers together. When exporting overseas, it is possible to fit five trailers in the space normally taken up by just one.
