Taylor Machine Works Brand Guidelines: Big Red Lift Trucks From Louisville, Mississippi

A repair shop and a logger’s dream.

Taylor Machine Works began in 1927 in Louisville, a small town in east-central Mississippi. The company says it was founded by W.A. Taylor Sr. as a small, family-owned automotive and repair business; in a 2005 interview with the trade site Forkliftaction, a member of the family described the start as a small machine shop opened by W.A. “Alex” Taylor in what he called a rural town. The trade magazine Crane Hot Line, reporting the company’s 80th anniversary in April 2007, gives the same founder and year.

Its first materials-handling machine came out of timber country. In 1937, the company says, W.A. Taylor Sr. built his first conventional timber skidder, later developed into a mobile skidder and loader known as the “Logger’s Dream.” The 2005 interview calls it the first mechanised means of skidding logs out of the woods and says it was promoted as “the answer to a logger’s dream”; Crane Hot Line describes it as a log skidder that made timber harvesting possible for small crews. A second “dream” product followed, the Pasture Dream, which the company says let farmers apply seed and fertiliser together without preparing a seedbed.

In the 1940s and 1950s, according to the 2005 interview, Alex Taylor saw the need for a cheap way to move lumber and pulpwood around the south-eastern United States, and his team built a forklift from an old truck chassis and a set of winches. The company dates its “Yardster” forklifts to the early 1950s and says they were used for lumber, pre-stressed concrete, steel and containerised freight, alongside a Pulpwood Dream for the pulpwood yards of the South. A 1951 issue of the Manufacturers Record, reproduced by the blog Preservation in Mississippi in 2016, shows an Art Moderne factory building on the north side of Louisville.

Big Red and the TEC-950.

The second generation widened the business. In the 1950s and 1960s, the 2005 interview says, W.A. “Bill” Taylor became active in management and built a dealer network across the United States. By the mid-1960s, the company says, it had one of the most advanced machine shops in the South, and its products ran from heavy-duty trailers and agricultural implements to reforestation equipment and log loaders, alongside the main line of forklift trucks.

Those trucks became “Big Red.” The company’s own description of the range covers pneumatic-tyre forklifts with lift capacities up to 125,000 pounds, cushion-tyre forklifts, log stackers, container handlers and reach stackers, with front-end attachments for particular jobs. In the 2005 interview the family pointed to what it called Taylor’s trademark red colour, its overhead-tilt profile and an all-steel superstructure as the features that make the machines stand out; it put the range at more than 85 models then, and Crane Hot Line reported more than 100 in 2007, serving forest products, steel, concrete, intermodal, transport, marina and aluminium customers.

Container handling became a large part of the story. According to the 2005 interview, Taylor developed the TEC-950 container handler in the late 1980s, building on more than twenty years in the intermodal trade, and the family described it then as one of the leading products in US container handling. In April 2007, marking its 80th anniversary, the company dedicated a new engineering and operations centre in Louisville and introduced the TX Series of forklifts, Crane Hot Line reported. Aftermarket parts and service are handled by a sister business, Sudden Service, the 2005 interview says.

More recent work has focused on power sources. In August 2023 Forkliftaction reported that Taylor would use Cummins 6.7-litre and 15-litre hydrogen engines in its range — Cummins engines already powered most of its roughly 100 forklift models — as part of a programme it calls Beyond Clean Lifting, which also includes battery-electric and fuel-cell machines. In July 2024 the Port of Los Angeles put Taylor ZLC 996 battery-electric top handlers into service at Yusen Terminals; the port, which had tested Taylor prototypes since 2019, called them the first battery-powered cargo top handlers in the United States, Forkliftaction reported.

Design and documentation.

Port and terminal equipment is sold to a small, specialist audience: port authorities, terminal operators, shipping lines and the logistics firms that move containers inland. The makers’ own websites and brochures tend to show the machines at work rather than on their own, because scale is the point. A ship-to-shore crane is pictured with its boom reaching out over the stacked deck of a container ship; a gantry is shown against the quay it serves.

The smaller machines are presented in the same working settings. Straddle carriers appear in long rows between container stacks, reachstackers lift boxes at the edge of a yard, and terminal tractors pull trailers and chassis between the quay and the gate. Forklift trucks and empty-container handlers are photographed in timber yards, steel mills and inland depots as well as in ports, since the same makers sell to heavy industry and distribution.

Automation has added a second kind of picture. Alongside the machines, the pictures now include control rooms and screens, and a maker such as Kalmar lists automation systems and charging solutions as products in their own right. Kalmar says the first fully automated straddle-carrier terminal opened in Brisbane in 2005, and ZPMC lists automated terminals in Xiamen and Shanghai among its projects.

Delivery is part of the story too. Large cranes are often moved fully assembled by sea: ZPMC says its own fleet carries large products whole, and English Wikipedia says it ships cranes in a fully erected state, so a crane standing upright on a heavy-lift vessel is a familiar image in the trade. The guides in this group follow makers across Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United States and China, and set out what each company says about itself alongside what independent sources record.

Still in the family, still in Louisville.

Taylor Machine Works has stayed private and in the family. The company says it is led today by the third and fourth generations of the Taylor family and describes itself as one of the only privately held makers of industrial lift trucks still operating in America. In 2005 it called itself the largest family-owned, full-line producer of heavy lift equipment in the United States, and said it intended to remain a family business; those are the company’s own descriptions. The company is still based in Louisville, Mississippi, where the original shop opened, and its machines are sold through dealers and direct representatives across North America and abroad, according to the 2005 interview.

The name can cause confusion online. The company trades on the web as Taylor Forklifts, and its older address for Taylor Machine Works now redirects to that site; it is unrelated to other businesses that share the Taylor name.

For a design guide, Taylor Machine Works shows how a single colour can carry a brand: the family itself pointed to the red of its machines, and the “Big Red” name turned that colour into the product line. Compare Hyster, another American maker of heavy lift trucks with roots in timber, and Svetruck, a maker of heavy forklifts. For this guide we use brick red, ember and pine with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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