Getting your yard ready for winter HGV parking

A yard in October tells you very little. The surface is dry, the gate swings, the light holds until seven. A yard in January tells you everything, and by then it is too late to do much about it.

If you are letting hardstanding to hauliers, or thinking about it, the next four weeks are the ones that matter. Not because anything dramatic happens, but because every job worth doing is cheaper and easier now than it will be in December.

What winter actually does to a surface

The damage is rarely the rain. It is the water that stays.

Standing water on concrete or tarmac works its way into every small gap in the surface. When the temperature drops and that water freezes, it expands, and the surface starts to break up from the inside. One hard frost on a puddle that should not have been there will do more harm than a month of steady rain running away properly.

Underneath, the same water erodes the subsoil the hardstanding sits on. That is how a yard that was perfectly solid last year develops soft spots and ruts under a loaded artic. Once the base goes, you are not patching a surface any more, you are rebuilding it.

Loaded vehicles make all of this faster. A yard taking forty-four tonne combinations is working harder than a car park, and it fails in places a car park never would.

Drainage fails first, and it fails quietly

Nobody inspects a gully pot. That is rather the point.

The common failures are dull and predictable. Channel drains silt up until they carry nothing. Gully pots block. Catch pits fill with debris. Pipework collapses or gets taken over by tree roots. In loading areas, repeated HGV traffic breaks the edges of channel drainage and cracks manhole covers, which then lets more silt in and accelerates the whole business.

None of that announces itself. The first sign is usually a puddle in a place there did not used to be one, and by the time the puddle is obvious the drain has been failing for months.

Walking the yard after heavy rain is the single most useful half hour you will spend this month. Where does the water go? Where does it sit? Is anything running towards the gate, the neighbour, or the bit of ground a driver has to walk across at two in the morning?

The clocks go back on 25 October

At 2am on Sunday 25 October, British Summer Time ends and the clocks go back an hour, as the Royal Observatory Greenwich confirms. From that weekend, most arrivals and departures at a working yard happen in the dark.

Lighting stops being a nice-to-have at that point. A driver reversing a trailer into an unlit yard, on a wet surface, with no fixed points to judge against, is a driver who will not come back. An operator whose insurer asks about overnight security wants a better answer than "there is a light on the building".

Lighting also does something less obvious. A lit yard is a yard where people can be seen, and that matters to a driver sleeping in a cab a long way from home. It is the cheapest security improvement most sites can make.

What a driver is actually judging

Not the things owners expect. In the wet and the dark, a driver is asking four questions, and they are all answered in the first ninety seconds:

Can I get in without a banksman? Can I turn without a twenty-point shunt? Is there something solid under the trailer legs? Can I see what I am doing?

A yard that answers yes four times will keep a tenant through a bad winter. A yard that answers no twice gets a phone call in February saying they have found somewhere else.

Worth doing before the end of the month

Clear the drainage. Jet what needs jetting, lift the gully pots, get the silt out of the channels. It is unglamorous and it is the highest-return thing on this list.

Walk the yard in the rain and mark where water sits. Fix the falls if you can, and if you cannot, at least know which bays are unusable when it is bad so you are not letting space you cannot deliver.

Check the lighting works, and check it works where vehicles actually move rather than only over the door.

Deal with the soft edges now. The spot that is slightly rutted in October is a hole in January.

And look at your listing. If your access hours shorten in winter, or certain bays come out of use when it is wet, say so. An owner who is straight about that keeps tenants. An owner who is not gets a bad review and deserves it.

The honest summary

Winter does not create problems in a yard. It finds the ones already there, and it charges you more to fix them than October would have. A site with working drainage, honest lighting and a surface that holds under load will let through the worst of it. One without will be empty by spring.

If you have hardstanding and you are getting it right for the winter, that is worth putting in front of the people looking for it. List it and say plainly what it offers in bad weather, because almost nobody else does. HGV-Parking.co.uk is free to use for your first 12 months, with no listing fees and no booking fees.

https://hgv-parking.co.uk/register?role=owner