Last year, Birmingham City Council placed one of the UK’s largest-ever orders for dedicated refuse collection vehicles.
Financial woes had seen the fleet decline over years of non-replacement, resulting in outdated council-owned vehicles propped up by hired-in replacements. After a competitive tendering process, an order for 151 vehicles was placed with British manufacturer Dennis Eagle.
Now owned by the Dutch Terberg concern, Dennis Eagle can claim to be the ‘last man standing’ in the British truck industry, with chassis and cab as well as bodywork manufacture in the UK.
It dominates the UK RCV parc, with the Elite chassis taking 70% of the low-entry cab market, and Dennis Eagle bodywork equipping 82% of all RCVs, including those with imported chassis.
Cabs are built in Blackpool and transported complete to Dennis Eagle’s main plant in Warwick, where chassis manufacture, powertrain installation, bodybuilding and installation, and PDI all take place.
The Birmingham order is split between full-size ‘Standard’ and ‘Narrow’ trucks, along with 41 Orus food waste collection vehicles, built on third-party 7.5-tonne chassis.
This diversity represents a long-evolving trend away from using a single vehicle type to collect mixed waste towards the collection of segregated waste streams for recycling or disposal using specialist vehicles.
Geoff Rigg, aftermarket director, explains: “In the 1980s, one of our predecessor companies, Eagle Engineering, produced the Phoenix body. It had a massive 3m3 loading hopper that was pretty much impossible to clog. It was designed to carry up to eight to 28m3 or 11 tonnes of waste, which was just thrown into the back and compacted as hard as possible before going to landfill.
“The arrival of the wheelie bin in the 1990s changed that. The size of the loading gate was reduced to 2.4m3 to enable automated emptying of wheelie bins, but the emphasis was still on high compaction rates and mixed loads.”
Domestic waste collection is now dominated by segregating loads to maximise recycling rates: glass, card, plastic, metals, paper and food waste are no longer in the general refuse stream.
“This has had an impact on the vehicle types required, and the wear on bodies and compactors,” Rigg explains. “Food waste is generally wet, and this used to lubricate the other material in the waste stream and reduce wear on the equipment. Without it, we find that other material, paper and card for instance, is very abrasive.”
To counter this, 8mm Hardox steel is used in high-wear locations.
Compaction rates also need to be moderated to ease the sortation and reclamation of recyclables, and different materials must be tipped separately.
VARIETY OF DESIGNS
Dennis Eagle offers different variations of its current Olympus body with multiple compartments and compactors to allow one vehicle to collect two or three different segregated waste streams. The single-compartment body design has also been enhanced to allow rapid cleaning when a vehicle switches from one collection to another.
The Olympus body is available in two widths: standard (2,530mm) and narrow (2,230mm), and this is matched by a slightly slimmer cab on the narrow, although interior dimensions of the cab remain unchanged, with seating for a driver and up to three loaders. The narrow body compacts waste at a higher rate than the standard, but the latter has a higher volume.
As a dedicated RCV product, the Dennis cab was designed with visibility and ease of ingress as priorities, and the Dennis Eagle Elite+ boasts a five-star Direct Vision rating from TfL. Multiple body lengths are available, ranging from 4,725 to 7,785mm.
A wide range of Dennis Eagle Elite+ chassis types accommodate these body variations, including 4x2, 6x2 rear-steer or rear-drive, and tridem rear or mid-steer 8x4 formats, with Hendrickson and Dana axles. 90% of production is of 6x2 rear-steer, which offers maximum body length and minimum tyre wear.
Front axle ‘underloads’ are a perennial problem on RCVs: 20% of the vehicle weight must be borne by the front axle in all load conditions to maintain steering control, but a typical RCV will have a heavy bin lift or similar cantilevered behind the rearmost axle, reducing the load on the front-end. Dennis Eagle has designed provision for ballast to be built into the front bumper and underside of the cab – up to around 900kg can be added here to counter the heavy rear end.
One way mainstream manufacturers get around this problem and improve crew access is to hang the cab down and forward of its conventional location, but Rigg says this can result in an over-long vehicle in a market where a small footprint is vital. Another Dennis Eagle advantage is an integrated production process. Cabs are built two weeks before the chassis, but body and chassis are built simultaneously before being married on a single production line.
EAGLE FLIES GLOBAL
The exact driveline specification is market dependent. Dennis Eagle trucks are exported to Australasia, North America and some EU nations. Home market and EU trucks use Volvo DK8 engines, while North America and Australasia get Cummins power. Complete vehicles are shipped to Australasia, while North American vehicles are assembled locally.
Allison fully automatic transmissions are standard, for a simple reason: “You can’t break them.” says Nathan Wilson, the UK account director for Allison.
Dennis Eagle has offered gas-powered engines in the past, but advances in diesel mean they now have no advantage in this application. It is invested into battery-electric though.
Rigg points out some forward-thinking authorities are already using heat from incinerating non-recyclable waste for thermal electricity generation and then recharging their RCVs from this source without drawing grid power. The predictable back-to-base nature of RCV work makes them ideal candidates for electrification, too.
Dennis Eagle offers the eCollect, which uses a proprietary driveline from Sheffield manufacturer Magtec. The eCollect shares the specification of Dennis Eagle’s most popular truck: an Elite 6x2 Narrow rear-steer with Olympus OL19 Narrow body and Terberg Omni split bin lift.
It is an area where technology is advancing fast. Rigg says: “We are constantly looking at developments to ensure eCollect remains competitive in the eRCV sector. We did try hybrid technology, but pure electric has advanced so far that the technology has been overtaken.”
Dennis Eagle does not have a dealer network in the British Isles. Sales are direct, and maintenance is undertaken by a team of over 100 mobile service engineers backed by 20 service centres in the UK and Ireland. Dennis Eagle will also take over the running of customer workshops if desired, too.
This set-up means all trucks must leave the factory ready for work. One of the last stations on the production line is axle alignment, undertaken by specialist technicians from Lasalign. On the day of Transport Engineer’s visit, the technician in question was Lasalign managing director Guy Glascodine.
“We’ve got so much experience with these vehicles that we know how the axles will settle during the initial bedding in process, and adjust them so they will set right,” he says.
“We recommend that all vehicles undergo a realignment after annual test, as this is the time when key chassis components are most likely to have been disturbed or replaced.”
