New high-tech road gritters join Yorkshire fleet

The new gritters will be joined by two new Yorkshire depots at Malton and Newport

A fleet of new "high-tech" gritters will be operating across Yorkshire this winter.

The 37 vehicles are part of a £44m England-wide investment by National Highways.

Two new winter maintenance depots will also open, one by the A64 in Malton, North Yorkshire and another off the A63 near Newport in East Yorkshire.

The new machines travel 10mph faster than older models and use digital maps to show gritting routes.

Other innovations include being able to choose the most appropriate treatment in different road conditions to allow precision spreading.

Gordon Thackeray from National Highways said: "These vehicles are environmentally friendly, have cutting-edge technological features and can be driven at a higher speed than older models.

"We now have a total of 58 vehicles ready to be deployed across Yorkshire and the North East and all of them will play their part in helping our autumn and winter operations team, including our drivers, to carry out their vital work over the next few months to treat the road surfaces whenever and wherever it is needed."

The cabs use digital mapping to show drivers the routes to be gritted

The new depots have storage barns capable of holding 3,500 tonnes of salt. Each have three gritters based there, with two carrying out precautionary treatments and the third used during snow.

From Newport, the gritters will salt more than 70 miles (113km) of the M62 and A63 from Hull docks in the east to Ferrybridge in the west.

Malton will treat 61 miles (98km) of the A64 from near the coast at Scarborough to York.

Across Yorkshire and the North East there are 14 winter maintenance depots, ten in Yorkshire and four in the North East, and 58 gritters treating a total of almost 950 miles (1529 km) of trunk roads and motorways. The region also has four snow blowers.

National Highways said last winter the gritters treated 434,217 miles (700,000km) of road across Yorkshire and the North East.

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