A rider who believes she was minutes from catastrophe when a horse came over the breast bar of her trailer wants to raise awareness – and prevent such a situation happening again.
Jennie Thorn told H&H she had one horse in her Ifor Williams HBX511 two-horse trailer and was near the A40 dual carriageway when the pin holding the breast bar came out of position.
“The bar came down and he got squashed in the front of the trailer,” she said. “He kicked the daylights out of it – thank god he didn’t get out of the jockey door – then went over the other breast bar into the other side of the trailer and ended up facing backwards.
“If we had been on the A40, I genuinely believe he’d have flipped the trailer over or come out backwards on the dual carriageway.”
Jennie said the silver lining of the horse’s facing backwards was that she was able, once he was calm, to lower the ramp, release the back bar and lead him out. He was uninjured but the trailer was damaged. Jennie said when she took it in to the sales and servicing centre she uses, she explained what had happened.
“He said straight away ‘The pin’s in the wrong way round’,” she said. “He said he’d seen it before, and I said ‘That’s terrifying’. He said it has to go left rather than right or it doesn’t close properly. That’s the difference between a horse nearly having a serious accident and not, and anyone could put the pin in the wrong way, and he said yes.”
Jennie said she read through the user’s manual on the trailer, which is two years old, and found no mention of the need to close the pins one way rather than the other.
“I read it from front to back and at no point does it say it’s possible to put the pins in the wrong way round,” she said. “I contacted Ifor Williams and said I thought this was really serious and they said it was user error. I said ‘Excuse me?’ I asked if they had any idea how serious this could have been, because of a pin facing the wrong way. If this is a known issue, why on earth is it not written in the manual?”
Jennie, a certified horse transporter, said the trailer is of very good quality, withstanding the horse crashing about in panic. But she wanted to share the story to make others aware of this issue. She has also asked Ifor Williams to consider editing the user manual, or taking out advertisements or social media posts.
“This isn’t about getting my trailer fixed,” she said. “I just don’t want there to be a terrible accident because this has happened to someone else.
“They’re great trailers and the quick release on the breast bars works brilliantly, but this could have been avoided.”
Ian Baldwin, group head of design at Ifor Williams Trailers, told H&H: “We have been using this same design for more than 20 years and to my knowledge we have never had a case like this raised with us before and our safety record is second to none.
“The design means it is very difficult to fit an open lynchpin in the wrong way around because if you do so the ring would be pushing against the side of the horsebox.
“If you have fitted it the wrong way around so it no longer acts as a lynchpin, you can just slide it in and out so it should be clear that it’s not doing anything at that point.
“However, as a precaution, we are going to revise the manual to provide additional clarity about how to use a lynchpin and take the customer through how to fit it step by step.”
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