Helping Fife Council turn a tight corner

Fife Council’s RCV drivers were finding life difficult on the narrow old streets of the small towns and villages in the north-east of the county, so it turned to Dennis Eagle to deliver a solution.

With Fife Council’s RCV suppliers only providing wide-body vehicles, Dennis Eagle stepped in to deliver four narrow-bodied, rear-steer OL16s. Due to their short wheelbases and tight turning circles, these RCVs are ideal for old streets and made an immediate difference.

“Straight away, the morale in the team went up so for us it’s been fantastic,” says Sandy Anderson, Service Manager for Waste Operations at Fife Council.

“Immediately, rounds improved by 30-45 minutes because it was suddenly easier to get around the narrow streets.”

The vehicles have been such a hit that the Council has taken delivery of six further OL16s, with three more to come later in the year.

Narrowing their focus

Sandy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to operating RCVs. He started as a refuse driver with Fife Council 21 years ago, before moving into his office job in 2012. While he drove Dennis Eagle trucks when he started out, the Council ended the relationship 14 years ago when they chose to go with one type of vehicle for both urban and rural collections.

“We have a mixture of larger urban areas in the west such as Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy, and in the north-east of Fife there are smaller towns and fishing villages with streets that would have been designed hundreds of years ago for horse and carts,” says Sandy. “The one-size-fits-all approach has been good for the urban areas, but we had constant feedback from the north-east of Fife that the vehicles we were using were too wide.”

Sandy agreed with the feedback and last year he turned to Dennis Eagle. “The feedback now is that we’ve got such a happy workforce because they’ve actually got the tools to do the job,” he says. “Our drivers love the fact we’ve got Dennis Eagle’s narrow-body vehicles back in because they can operate with much greater confidence now.”
 

Improving services

The OL16s have not only reduced the time it takes to complete rounds but also increased the number of bins collected.

“Anecdotally, there have been fewer complaints about missed bins,” says Sandy. “With the wider vehicles, our teams would get to a street and just couldn’t get into it, because of things like cars being parked where they shouldn’t be. Now, our drivers get down streets they wouldn’t have been able to before.”

Based on Dennis Eagle’s success at Fife’s north-east depot, the Council has ordered nine more vehicles to expand the fleet into a depot in the semi-urban area of east Fife. However, Sandy says the benefits of once again working with Dennis Eagle don’t start and end with the narrow body.

“For the driver and the two loaders working in the cab, the comfort is out of this world,” he says. “The visibility you get with the Dennis Eagle truck is the best out there, and everything in the cab is really simple to use. They even custom-build tablets into the dashboard to make it easier to tick off streets while on rounds.”

After 14 years apart, it’s good to be back together again. As always, Dennis Eagle has gone the extra mile in a relationship and has donated money to Fife Council to have advertising for a local mental health charity wrapped around some of the cabs. “I knew exactly what we were getting with Dennis Eagle,” says Sandy. “They’re the best on the market.”