 | Home > Off Topic > driving a digger on the road |
 
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| blackwolf Member Since: 03 Nov 2009 Location: South West England Posts: 16943   
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As long as its a wheeled (not tracked) machine and under 7.5 tons GVW your licence should be fine. You will need insurance, and you must be running on white diesel. The vehicle should be MOT exempt since it is classified as engineering plant under the Authorisation of Special Types regs (and therefore not covered by C&U). Tax Class is probably "special vehicle" at (I think £160 pa) since it isn't old enough to be "historic".
The above is based on my experience and judgement and as far as I know is correct, but don't assume that it is bang up to date legal advice! Make your own decision! 
I have a road legal 1961 mobile crane weighing 12 tons gvw and faced many similar questions when I bought it. |
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18th Dec 2013 11:13am |
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| JWL Member Since: 26 Oct 2011 Location: Hereford Posts: 3443  
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There is a train of thought that you could run on red if you own the digger in your name and are travelling to your holding, not from site to site(job to job) if you have just purchased it but it would be advisable to use derv. Just be aware that a trip of 40 miles is going to take you over 2 hours, it will be noisy, very very bouncy and you'll probably not wish to sit in the thing for days afterwards. I often used to stand in for a digger driver who operated a machine that my boss would have out on contract hire near enough 50 weeks of the year and spent most of its time working with British Gas replacing gas mains around the Midlands. It wasn't unusual to finish in Wolverhampton on a Friday afternoon, the driver would bring it down to us at Stratford on Avon that day for us to service on a Saturday then it would either be me taking the digger to the other side of Rugby or I'd fetch the driver back for his van on the Sunday. Even when we got a 40kmh box on one it still felt as if you were crawling along, well you will be on every uphill slope!
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18th Dec 2013 2:00pm |
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| blackwolf Member Since: 03 Nov 2009 Location: South West England Posts: 16943
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The red regs have been tightened up, and very few businesses can now use red on the road (forestry and agriculture and not much else now).
If you own the digger privately and it is registered and taxed you cannot under any circumstances run it on red now, even on your own land. If you SORN it so that it cannot legally be driven on the road, then you should be able to use red on private land since you cannot drive it on the road. I have the same situation with my crane - because it is registered, insured and has a tax disc and therefore can be driven out onto the road, it cannot use red even if on private land. 
A low-loader may cost less than you think! |
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18th Dec 2013 2:23pm |
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| JWL Member Since: 26 Oct 2011 Location: Hereford Posts: 3443
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I bow to your more up to date knowledge Blackwolf, I have been out of the ins and outs of what's right and wrong these days. In a lot of ways I'm glad to be clear of it. I worked for a fair number of years for a large farm run within the same family. The old man had originally come over from Ireland with a plant hire set up and began farming over here as a sideline. When I worked for them the three sons were running the business now mainly farming but with a few plant hire projects as well. We had just one JCB on hire but we still had ties on the maintenance of heavy sludge water pumps that were running around the country on long term drainage schemes. They had a claim to fame as being involved with lowering the water table when the Thames Barrier was being built so parts of the construction could take place. We'd constantly be rebuilding Sykes water pumps with two or three cylinder Lister diesels and if you were lucky you might get one with an electric start!
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18th Dec 2013 2:52pm |
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| diesel_jim Member Since: 13 Oct 2008 Location: hiding Posts: 6046 
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I used to drive a 555 on one of the farms I worked on in the summer when at school. Great fun! it was a hydrostatic one, so just pull the lever from forward to reverse, and as it was only a 2wd and I was loading a slurry spreader, it would spin very easily in the concrete silo
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18th Dec 2013 7:33pm |
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