counterbalance - Stackers Training

One of our instructors is spending 4 days training on a pedestrian stacker truck in Gillingham this week.

Gillingham has strong maritime and military connections with the nearby historic dockyard in Chatham and the Royal Engineers barracks based in the town. The town is also the birthplace of the Elizabethan seafarer, William Adams. He grew up in the town before becoming apprenticed to a shipbuilder on the Thames. He learned his trade and went on to navigate a fleet of ships to Japan.

Gillingham is one of five towns in the Medway. The River Medway threads together Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham. The Hoo Peninsula also links Medway to the Thames Estuary. The rivers are steeped in history, rich in wildlife, and the Medway is a popular waterway for pleasure trips, watersports and sightseeing.

If you haven’t been to our training centre at Apollo Park, Wroxton, near Banbury you may not know that Apollo Park was built on the former site of the North Oxfordshire Ironstone Company’s headquarters and railway locomotive yards.

The North Oxfordshire Ironstone Company was established in June 1917 after approaches were made by the Ministry of Munitions, who were keen to increase substantially the production of home ore in the English Midlands. The quarries were connected to the main line railway system via a 3.5-mile industrial railway built by German prisoners of war and the quarries grew to become one of the most important single sources of iron ore in Britain. The Wroxton quarries went into liquidation in September 1967, although some workings were sold off and struggled on until c.1978. The scale and importance of the undertaking is shown by the production figures of 40,000 tons of ore per week in 1965, with a total production of 33 million tons over a fifty-year period.

When you enter Apollo Park you will see an Iron Ore Tippler Wagon which has been restored by Apollo as a “respectful nod” to the park’s industrial heritage.

As you will see from the aerial photo below, there is a local playing field adjacent to the site’s north west boundary – otherwise the surrounding area is characterised by open farm land.

For information on the forklift training courses that we can provide at our training centre at Apollo Park, call us at Stackers Training on 0800 024 8084 or e-mail anne@stackerstraining.co.uk

Training in Gillingham, Kent

An aerial view of Apollo Park, Wroxton, near Banbury