Powerscreen Brand Guidelines: Ulster Plant, the Chieftain & Dungannon’s Mobile Screens

Eight people and a mobile screen.

Powerscreen began in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, in 1966, under a much plainer name: Ulster Plant. The company’s own timeline and Recycling Product News, reporting its 50th anniversary in June 2016, give the same start, with eight employees. Powerscreen says the founders’ idea was to take the machine to the quarry face, instead of paying to move material to the machine, and it calls this the pioneering of mobile screening. HeavyQuip Magazine summed it up in October 2026 as bringing the machine to the material. Lee Mallaghan is listed as a co-founder in the company’s Hall of Fame announcement of April 2023.

The first machine type was the MK1. A 1966 MK1, described by Recycling Product News as the sixth machine built, was then a permanent feature at the Dungannon plant, and in December 2025 the company said a restored MK1 sits outside its headquarters. For the 60th anniversary the company showed a fully refurbished MK1 at Hillhead, the British quarry trade show, in 2026.

Export came quickly. Powerscreen says it sent its first machine abroad in 1969, to Sweden. The company dates the Powerscreen name to the 1970s, along with the start of exports to the United States. It launched the Chieftain screening range in 1980. In a May 2026 release Sean Loughran, its business line director, said the Chieftain went on to provide the blueprint for many modern mobile aggregate screens, which is the company’s own view of its influence.

The company’s interests once went beyond quarries. English Wikipedia’s entry on Belleek Pottery says the Dungannon company bought that Fermanagh porcelain maker in 1988 and opened a visitor centre the following year; the pottery changed hands again in 1990.

From Pegson to Terex.

The route to today’s range ran through England. English Wikipedia’s entry on Terex Pegson says the crusher maker of Coalville, Leicestershire, founded in 1830 as Samuel Pegg and Son, was bought by Powerscreen in 1996 and merged with Brown Lennox.

In 1999 Powerscreen became part of the American Terex Corporation. The company’s timeline, HeavyQuip Magazine and a dated statement from Northern Ireland’s Executive Office all give that year; the Executive Office said in March 2024 that Powerscreen “is owned by Terex” and that Terex bought the local company in 1999. The purchase also brought Pegson under Terex. For a decade the two lines sat side by side, until in 2009 Powerscreen and Terex Pegson were, in the company’s words, united under the Powerscreen brand name. English Wikipedia’s Pegson entry says Terex Pegson machines are now branded Powerscreen. The 1966 name outlived the one dating from 1830.

Inside Terex, Powerscreen is one of several brands in the Materials Processing business, alongside Finlay, EvoQuip and MDS, according to Terex. On 30 October 2026 Terex added to that family, announcing an agreement to buy Keestrack, founded in Belgium in 1988, with completion expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals; Keestrack is to remain an independent brand.

The Dungannon base stayed. Powerscreen International won a Queen’s Award for International Trade in 2009 for mobile screening equipment, the published list of winners records. In March 2024 First Minister Michelle O’Neill attended the opening of new headquarters there, and the Executive Office described a Terex presence of more than 2,000 employees across Northern Ireland.

Rock, rotors and recycling yards.

Crushing and shredding makers sell machines that are hard to photograph badly. The usual picture is a tracked crusher on a quarry bench, its conveyor throwing stone onto a stockpile, with the plant small against the rock face. A mobile screen in the maker’s signature colour, parked on the same bench, does the work of a logo at a distance, and many of these brands treat paint as part of the identity. Metso, for one, set out its machine colours in a dated release in 2021.

Waste machinery has a different picture. Shredder makers show the inside of the machine: a cut-away rotor with its cutters on display, or bales of plastic heading into a hopper. Compost screens and trommels appear in long windrows, and recycling yards are often shot from a drone, so the sorted heaps form a pattern from above.

Trade fairs give the sector its calendar. Bauma in Munich, CONEXPO-CON/AGG in Las Vegas and Hillhead in Britain gather the quarry trade, and IFAT in Munich gathers the waste and recycling trade. Metso’s Lokotrack went to Munich in 1986, Metso says, and Powerscreen used CONEXPO and Hillhead to mark its 60th anniversary in 2026. Fair stands are where these brands show new models beside restored old ones, and where dealers, who do much of the selling, meet the factory.

Product names carry unusual weight. Ranges are named as families, and a name can outlast the company that made it: several brands in this guide sit inside larger groups and keep their own names, colours and dealer networks. Ownership changes often, so each entry here gives dates for who owns what, and what each company says about where its machines are made.

Names that sound like machinery.

Powerscreen’s naming has a clear pattern. Its scalping screens are Warrior, launched in 2003, and Titan, beside the Chieftain inclined screens. Its tracked crushers join a descriptive word to “trak”: Premiertrak jaw crushers, Maxtrak cone crushers and Trakpactor impact crushers. For CONEXPO-CON/AGG in Las Vegas in March 2026 it announced the 1300X Maxtrak and Trakpactor 480SR, and for Hillhead the Chieftain 2200 and a prototype 1000X Maxtrak.

Manufacturing is the centre of its claims. Powerscreen says manufacturing and research and development continue in County Tyrone, where it began. The trade body Manufacturing NI said in September 2026 that machines designed and made in Mid Ulster operate across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia. There is also a second base: in October 2026 the company announced Volt, a tracked hybrid range developed and made by Powerscreen India at Hosur, starting with the Premiertrak 410 Volt and Maxtrak 1010 Volt.

Its identity leans on people and dealers as much as hardware. The company says it serves customers through distributors in many countries, and that long relationships with firms such as Blue Group, its British distributor, are central to the business. Pat McGeary, Blue Group’s chairman, told the trade press in 2016 that he joined in 1968, when it was a little local factory. The company launched a Hall of Fame at CONEXPO in 2023, and its anniversary weekend in Dungannon, PowerFest, brought together employees, retirees, distributors and local residents. Loughran told Manufacturing NI that people called the site “the University of Powerscreen,” and HeavyQuip Magazine reported that many former employees went on to found dealerships and engineering businesses.

On its website the anniversary is written as “60 Years of Power,” with the slogan “Choose a Leader, Choose Powerscreen!” and an AI support tool called Ask Powerscreen.

For a design guide, Powerscreen shows how a plain regional company can build a brand on one idea and a set of memorable machine names, and keep it through a change of owner. Compare Terex, its American parent, and McCloskey International, a separate maker with its own Northern Ireland story. For this guide we use a quarry blue and a washed sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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