Skeletal trailer haulage — built for boxes.
Skelly chassis trailers behind 44 t artic units — 20 ft, 40 ft and 45 ft ISO container movements out of Dublin Port.
A skeletal trailer — 'skelly' for short — is a bare chassis built for one job: locking down an ISO container at the four corner twist-lock points and getting it from A to B. There are no curtains, no body, no floor between the pins. Just steel, twist-locks and air-suspension, ready to carry 30 tonnes of container without weighing the truck down with its own dead weight.
Why a skelly, and not a flatbed
Containers are designed to live on twist-locks. A flatbed makes you strap and chock; a skelly drops the corner pins into the corner castings and you're secured by design. The chassis is lighter, lower, and easier to load and unload at the port. For high-cube containers (9 ft 6 in tall) you also get the legal headroom — a high-cube on a flatbed is usually over the bridge limit.
Where we run skelly trailers
Most of our skelly work runs out of Dublin Port to inland destinations, with empty container returns on the back-haul. We also handle inter-port transfers (Dublin–Belfast, Dublin–Cork) and occasional ad-hoc moves between depots. Bookings coordinate directly with your shipping line and customs broker so the container clears as fast as the truck arrives.
- 20 ft, 40 ft and 45 ft ISO container movements
- Dedicated skelly chassis behind 44 t 6×2 artic units
- Twist-lock pins and corner-cone load security
- Dublin Port collections and empty container returns
- Container transfers between Irish ports
- Coordinated with shipping lines and customs brokers
