Terberg Brand Guidelines: A Benschop Forge, Terminal Tractors & a Royal Predicate

A blacksmith, a village and five generations.

Terberg began as a village forge. The company says that on 13 May 1869 Johannes Bernardus Terberg set up as a blacksmith in Benschop, a village near Utrecht in the Netherlands, and that the business has stayed in the family ever since. Its own history says his son Willem George took over just before the First World War, and that in the early twentieth century the firm sold bicycles, repaired cars and supplied spare parts.

The turn to vehicles came after the Second World War. In 1949, the company says, it began converting trucks obtained from the American army for use in the construction industry, and later built complete vehicles of its own; it dates its first 6×6 dump truck, the SF1200 on a Terberg chassis, to 1966, and its first exports, to building sites in Western Europe and the Middle East, to 1972. The third generation — four brothers and two sisters, in the company’s words — added truck building, car sales and servicing and, later, car leasing.

The product that now defines the name arrived in 1973, when Terberg says it delivered its first terminal tractor to a customer in the Port of Rotterdam — a tractor for moving trailers around a port, which the company presents as a more efficient alternative for that work. In the years that followed it set up companies for waste-collection equipment (from 1975), leasing (1984), and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Middle East.

The family character is documented independently. In April 2017 the NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, reported that Terberg Group had won the Familie Bedrijven Award 2017, presented in the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague; the jury praised the 148-year-old family firm for innovation and commitment, and the NOS noted that the fourth generation had taken charge two weeks earlier. Chairman George Terberg told the broadcaster that family members who want to work in the business must hold a higher-education degree and have five years’ experience at another company first.

Shunting tractors, refuse bodies and forklifts.

Today the group describes itself as a developer, producer and modifier of special vehicles and systems for port terminals, logistics and waste collection, with service, parts, rental and telematics alongside. It is organised in divisions. Terberg Special Vehicles makes yard tractors, RoRo tractors, industrial tractors and road/rail tractors for ports, distribution centres, heavy industry, railway yards and airports; the company says its shunting tractors are used in more than 120 countries, and it presents its newer YT series as one platform for diesel, fully electric and, later, hydrogen fuel-cell power.

Terberg Environmental makes refuse-collection bodies, bin lifts, recycling bodies and underground waste systems. Terberg Kinglifter makes truck-mounted forklifts that ride on the back of delivery trucks, offered with 1.5 or 2.5 tonnes capacity, the company says. Terberg Techniek fits extra axles to Volvo trucks and makes the X-Track auxiliary front-wheel-drive system for forestry, construction and municipal vehicles.

The group has grown by merger and acquisition as well as by founding companies. It lists a 2016 merger with the RosRoca Group, the Spanish maker of refuse-collection equipment, the acquisition of Manuport in Italy in 2018, and, in 2023, the purchase of Zenith Engineering in Singapore to strengthen Terberg Environmental in South-East Asia. Its timeline also records Dennis Eagle Inc. opening a refuse-truck factory in Summerville, South Carolina, in 2021.

It has also sold businesses. The company says Terberg Specials was sold to Veth Automotive in 2021 and Terberg Business Lease Group to Arval in 2022.

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.

A predicate for 150 years, and a factory in Mississippi.

In 2019 the company marked its 150th anniversary with the Royal predicate, the Dutch royal warrant. Its press release of 13 May 2019 says the warrant was presented in the village hall in Benschop by the King’s Commissioner for the Province of Utrecht, and the group has traded since as the Royal Terberg Group, a holding company based in IJsselstein, near Benschop. In 2021, the company says, George Terberg handed the chairmanship to his cousin Godfried Terberg; it describes members of the fifth generation as now working in the business, and gives its present size as more than 3,000 employees in 15 countries.

The Americas are the newest chapter. Terberg opened Terberg Tractors Americas in Miami in 2014. In August 2022 Truck & Bus Builder reported that Royal Terberg Group had formed a joint venture with the Taylor Group of Companies of Louisville, Mississippi, which the magazine described as specialising mainly in forklifts and heavy machinery, called Terberg Taylor Americas Group, to build a factory in Lowndes County, Mississippi, and a network for selling, leasing and servicing Terberg terminal tractors in the United States, with Terberg’s Miami office folded into it. The company dates the opening of that production facility to 2024, the year it also celebrated fifty years of terminal tractors.

The Terberg name now appears across several divisions and many countries, while the holding company remains, in its own words, a family business focused on continuity.

For a design guide, Terberg shows how a family name can carry a forge’s history onto port equipment sold worldwide. Compare Taylor Machine Works, of Louisville, Mississippi, and Kalmar, another maker of terminal tractors. For this guide we use a deep navy, a warm amber and a muted polder green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Terberg’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.