Plant & Machinery Recovery
On Every UK Motorway

Moving a broken-down excavator or a seized telehandler off a construction site is nothing like recovering a car from a motorway hard shoulder. The machine may weigh anywhere from a couple of tonnes to well over 20, it may be in a position that no wheeled vehicle can easily reach, and the ground beneath it may be soft enough to make conventional loading dangerous without ground-bearing plates or timber matting. Our plant recovery team assesses each job individually: machine type, operating weight, track or wheel configuration, and the condition of the surface it is sitting on all influence which combination of low-loader, HIAB crane, or winch is the right approach. Our low-loaders range from units suitable for compact plant up to high-capacity trailers for larger tracked excavators and demolition equipment.

Thrown tracks are one of the most common plant recovery scenarios we attend. A tracked machine with one track off cannot move under its own power and needs specialist lifting equipment to reposition it before the track can be refitted and tensioned. On a site with restricted access, that often means bringing in a HIAB-equipped vehicle that can work in a tighter radius than a full mobile crane. For machines stuck in soft ground, a regular occurrence during wet weather on earthworks sites, we use snatch blocks and high-capacity winches to extract the machine before attempting to load it. Attempting to drag a bogged machine directly onto a low-loader without proper extraction first can damage the undercarriage or tip the trailer, so the sequence of operations matters.

Plant recovery on a live site means meeting the site's access and induction requirements and working safely alongside other trades, so our operators are familiar with the accreditations and procedures that main contractors expect. If the plant has broken down mid-shift and the site needs to keep running, we work around the programme as far as we can, clearing the machine from the working area as quickly as possible so other operations are not held up. For plant that needs transporting between sites rather than just recovered, we handle abnormal load permits and route planning where required.