Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

The Money The Wages are not too bad for Australian’s around 700 a week the average wage in Australia is about 500 a week in Australian Dollars the Australian dollar is less than the U.S. Dollar.

The good part of doing the job is there is no boss looking over you shoulder and every trip is different. You are so far away you have to do your own thing ,you have to be a jack of all trades if the truck stops you have to try and get it going by yourself, help is hundred’s of miles away.

The bad part of the job is that you have a time table to keep up with and you are paid only when you are working. If you breakdown and have to wait for someone to come out hundred’s of miles to get you going you do not get paid for the waiting time, a good time to catch on your sleep.

All the photos I have taken my self, I am not the best at taking photos, you can use any of my photos as you like. I will be happy to answer your questions. Most trucks these days are air conditioned and some trucks have small fridges.

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Trucks have to be made to Road-Trains standards with outgoing into lots of details, that would take all day - The chassis are made stronger with more cross-members and the chassis are not allowed to be too long so you do not have room for big sleeper cabs. We have to double the number of air tanks plus more fuel tanks on both sides, there’s more but I don’t have time to go into.

Why Road Trains

The reason we have Road-Trains in Australia is that Australia is about the size of the U.S.A. but most of our people live within ten miles of the sea in a handful of cities. The inland of Australia is made up of a few cattle ranchers we call cattle stations they are hundreds of square miles in size but because the land is so dry and there is not much water there are few cattle spread over a lot of land,most of the land is still unused government land.

We do not have freeway’s from coast to coast. The number of cars are few and the roads are narrow with one lane in each direction when you get two trucks passing each other they are only feet apart.

So with thousands of miles of road between the city’s and no hills to cross Road-Trains make good sense the normal Road-Train is made up of three 44 foot trailers with a twin axle turn table dolly under the front of the trailer hooked up to the back of the trailer in front of it with a ring feeder and a dolly bar the load is 115 tonne spread over the three trailers.

As I have said the normal Road-Train is of three trailer but in the mining game they haul six trailer or more.

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The Trucks

Most Road-Train tractors, that’s what you call them in the U.S. are Macks or Kenworths, both makers have their tractors assembled in Australia with right hand drive. Most tractors have v8 engines, the engines are the same as used in the U.S. but are not smaller than 450 H.P. The gear boxes have a minimum of 13 gears, no lazy axle’s, and at least eighty thousand pound diffs plus double chassis rails.

We have twice the number of air tanks to handle the 3 or more 44 foot trailers. You will find that the tractors are a lot shorter than you use because we need them short to manoeuvre the trailers to hook up the 3 or more trailers, plus a short wheel base is stronger and their are other different changes that have to be made to make Road-Train specification. Of course you can not back up with 3 or more trailers too far, what we do is, the Road-Train is dropped at the depot and split up so each trailer can be delved to the final desertion.

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