After an additional three hours loading trailers where they didn’t want to load and reinvigorating converter dollies that had given up the willingness to work, I finally rolled out the yard all 36 or whatever metres of me. A quick adaptation to my extra ten metres was affected as I made my way across Toowoomba amongst the Friday evening traffic and finally I was on the open road… WHOOSH! I’d blown an airline some where and thirty two of my forty two tyres ceased being those agreable rotating masses and turned into lead weights. As the brakes rapidly gained a firm hold on everything I managed to get some of the combination off the road but not all… A run to the top of the hill behind me with safety triangles was required before the next behemoth came wandering along. After a quick check of the lines and taps I found the offending coupling and made good the air leak. Again the dash to the top of the hill to collect my triangles and dash back to remove the obstacle but at least we were rolling again and not a moment too soon as the heavens opened up and doused the hot humid evening with rain drops, the size of which only a summer storm in Queensland can produce.

After three hours driving I made it to Goondiwindi for a shower and some dinner before continuing on my way, across the border into New South Wales and continuing south down the Newell Highway. I was following another truck as we crossed the border and continued to do so until Moree. The lights on his back trailer had been flickering on and off for some time and finally gave up so we stopped at Moree to find the problem. A quick replacement job on his trailer socket, hastened by a squadron of oversize mosquitoes, saw illumination return to his combination and we trundled on.

The approach to Coonabarabran required me to loose my back trailer and return to a slightly more manageable size so as to navigate my way through the town and commence the one hour of hills and curves that leads down to Gilgandra where I unhooked ready to bobtail it back up to Connabarabran to fetch my remaining trailer. I gave a few ineffective minutes help to another driver, doing the same as I, whose trailer had sunk in the bitumen the moment he’d pulled out from underneath it and started the hour long run north again.

Alas my body couldn’t make it and I was forced to pull up in a rest area just twenty kilometres from Coonabarabran, thoroughly exhausted after almost eight hundred kilometres of driving but the sun was threatening to start her own ascent so I wasn’t disappointed.

I was all booked in for a leisurely five hour flight, out of Sydney, to Perth. But as it turned out there’s a brand new set of trailers waiting to be hauled out of Toowoomba, destined for Perth.

Tuesday was to be day one but as the trucking Gods aren’t as worried about specific dates and times as the local authorities, Tuesday fast became Thursday and then Friday.

I’ve not operated a Road Train before and at around ten metres longer than my usual B-Double there are a few extra restrictions affecting their operation… Route restrictions, speed limits etc. I set out on the Internet to find out what I don’t know. With four states to be crossed, I had to visit four different websites for the relevant authorities, all with different requirements, permits and restrictions. After many hours of frustration, a little enlightenment and the demise of several trees, printing permits, I was satisfied I had armed myself with enough to ward off the most tenacious of RTA Officers, but only time will tell.

I pushed north on the seven hour drive from home to Toowoomba in my trusty yard-car, an older Ford Falcon station wagon that refuses to die. It’ll sit up here for a few weeks until I can pick it up so it wasn’t going to be the Beemer’s job this time. As it turned out I was glad that I made this selection… The New England Highway, after several inches of rain and the increased traffic load, thanks to the closure of a flooded Newell Highway, had been reduced to little more than a goat-track. Great strips of bitumen had been ripped from the road exposing the dirt below and the constant pounding had further hollowed out these areas, leaving huge potholes, each one at least four inches deep and several feet long, some the whole width of the road.

I didn’t get as far as Armidale, less than three hours up the road when the inevitable happened and I hit a hole, hard, unable to find a good path. The belts in the tyre snapped and the rim was buckled. It held the air pressure but was a weird shape, no longer the nice round shape it was intended to be. I shuddered and wobbled into town to source a new tyre and rim, loosing two hours in the process. The balance of the journey remained unpunctuated by any event save for more rain and more pothole dodging.

I arrived in Toowoomba reasonably late and wandered around to the trailer manufacturers yard to pick up the Prime Mover that was patiently awaiting my arrival. “Miss Madysen” was here name, boldly emblazoned across the sides of her bonnet, a huge Western Star Constellation that made my old Kenworth cab-over look like something designed for a jockey.

I put my heart on my sleeve, as it were, in my last post and the supportive and encouraging comments and personal emails I received were a wonderful beacon amongst the shadows. These are people I barely know, if at all; our only common point of reference is our passion for trucking and a shared interest in my ramblings. If I past you on the road you would no sooner recognise me than I you and yet the hand of friendship has been extended across the fog line of the information super-highway just as it would across the black top.

It’s encouraging to know that there are still those that care for a fellow human being, no matter his or her plight and now matter the tenuous threads that secure the friendship. these are truly good people.

It’s also worth noting that most if not all of us have at some time suffered bereavement, marital breakdown or other trauma that can be life changing at the time but leaves us as survivors at the end of the day. Sure, I’ve had my share too but you never have to look far to find someone who is in much more need of help than yourself and it usually puts your plight into perspective.

At Christmas, while I wallowed in my own misery I heard on the news of the father and well known Chef, Matt Golinksi, who lost his wife and children in a house fire and was fighting for his own survival as a result of his attempts to rescue his loved ones. Nothing can bring them back to him and I thought at the time that he would probably wish himself dead if not for his comatose state. I also read the out pouring of an Army acquaintance as he distilled the tragedies of his life to paper… The horror of dragging his wife’s lifeless body, her neck broken, from a car wreck that happened as she followed his truck and the subsequent loss of his parents one after the other and a myriad of other disasters that befell his path, yet he is now a champion of helping others as they struggle. I’m not too proud to admit that I wept for both these men, possibly in part due to my own stress but more in solemn recognition of the strength of character these individuals posses to endure such heartache and continue on.

It’s not without our own personal pains that we live, they are partly responsible for the joy felt when it things go the right way, but it’s important to remember that we are never the only ones suffering and often we are the least affected but you don’t know until you open your eyes and look around, stretch out your hand to a neighbour and care.

That’s the lore of the road.

No time to dwell on it I climbed back into the truck to continue on into the future. Ironically, after trying to draw everyone’s attention to the potential for depression on the road, during Movember, I was now walking my own black dog, only a Chihuahua but the walk itself is still long. It’s become evident to me that a change is needed. Staring out this window all day, up and down these well worn tracks and facing the torment of useless city drivers at the end of each trip is going to turn me into a nutcase. Normally it’s not too bad, but just at the moment, I don’t care too much for the pee-wees in their tin-tops harassing this particular eagle.

Time for a change, time to head west! It’s time to get heavy, heavy haulage style. Come February the learning curve will steepen as I come to grips with an increased girth and a reduction of length. Who said size doesn’t matter?

I must say that I’m rather excited by the impending challenges, after all my collective knowledge of wide loads is sitting on the fog line as they toil the other way calling out their impressive widths over the two-way. it’s okay though Eammon, I learn quickly. Navigating back across the paddock the first time may also pose some issues as I’ve never visited Perth before and will arrive in an A300, can’t imagine they’ll let me sit up the front so I can see how we get there. Maybe I could come back with my own pilot, just to make it easier.

For now I’ve got two more weeks dragging doubles along the east coast, then onwards to the future… Bring it on!

One of the topics was the horrific accident at Urunga in which an 11 year old boy, sleeping in his holiday home was killed by a B-Double when it left the road after an accident. The driver of a ute was also killed after being involved in the initial accident and the occupants of the truck were both seriously injured.

The main sentiment in the reporting of this incident is that it’s a TRUCK accident and to some degree it is, had the truck been a smaller vehicle it would have had less momentum but as yet no announcement has been made as to who or what was the cause of the initial accident. Two main points appear to be at the forefront of the people minds and that’s that the trucks are to big and the roads are crap!

I’ll agree with the second part, the roads are crap for what they do and while the Pacific Highway has improved greatly over the last decade, it lags behind the Hume Highway in a big way. Bottle necks through small towns, such as Urunga, a bridge you can hardly get two trucks across at Macksville, constant flood issues and all it’s other vagaries have left it a “squirrel track”, white knuckling all the way as you think about your nuts!

If you’re hauling a load to Brisbane out of Sydney, there is little option, Pacific or New England Highways are the only choice and sadly the New England is even worse than the Pacific.

What works me up the most though, once we move on from the tragedy of these accidents, is the ignorance of people and no, I’m not talking exclusively about drivers for once… “Why don’t they move the freight by rail?” was the call of Wendy Harmer and many of the callers. I’ll tell you why… because of the consumers!

You want it yesterday right? There was a time when a trip to town for supplies was a once a month or once a week affair, depending on how far town was and refrigeration was a luxury with deep freezers unheard of, yet we’ve become lazy and impatient with little ability to plan and an insatiable desire to consume.

Our evolution to “Human Locusts” has driven freight away from rail. We need a supermarket just around every corner so it’s never more than a few minutes away, not located at the rail head like it use to be and if you buy it on eBay it better get around the world quicker than Phileas Fogg or you’ll be dialling 1800 WERE THE HELL”S MY STUFF! So don’t blame the trucks for being there, blame yourself… Spend your time boiling down left-over soap, buy loose tea instead of bags so you can buy a tea-chest full and start growing your own vegies and eat what’s in season, no more winter Mangoes or fresh OJ; getting my point yet?

Rail can’t supply our demands and even if it could, how many utes does it take to deliver 34 tonnes of freight to it’s final destination? The suburban roads would be plagued by courier vans and small deliver vehicles with erratic routes, demanding schedules and no fatigue management. Making the trucks smaller won’t help either, for every two B-Doubles you take off the road, you’ll need three semi-trailers… More vehicles means more exposure to potential risk events. Of course the registration costs for lead trailers is in dire need of overhaul as the sky high costs are forcing many to park the double in favour of more profitable single trailers. B-doubles are also required to have higher specifications for safety  than a prime mover pulling a single trailer… Front under-run protection, spray suppression and ABS on the truck are all requirements for a B-Double permit along with more highly assessed drivers and this has driven the fleet toward modernisation leaving less safe vehicles to tow single trailers, often around our more urbanised regions. New trucks are also cleaner trucks.

While the Government response at all levels is to promise improvements and to roll out more and more ‘safety measures’ that target the road freight operators the bottom line is that if all drivers were better trained there would be few accidents, seldom if ever do two parked vehicles cause an accident, it takes driver to stuff things up.

More common sense should be used in developing road rules to address speed disparity, a major contributor to aggressive and impatient driving. Get drivers to keep left, turn off their fog lights and use basic equipment like mirrors and indicators instead of iPhones. Standardised rules would probably help too, if you did nothing else to the road rules other than unify them at least all the crappy drivers would driver in a similar crappy way.

Education is what’s required and possibly the cheapest solution as users can pay for it themselves and how about some media coverage on how to share the roads with heavy vehicles. I see heaps of ads about how to be safe near trains and at level crossings but nothing about how to play nice with trucks. Let’s address the problems for what they are and stop throwing stones without better consideration of the real problems.

Keeps it Safe!

Mat

To the vast majority of car the drivers I had the pleasure of sharing the Pacific Highway with yesterday, thanks for nothing. While I didn’t see any crashes I saw a lot of near misses.

What is it about driving that is so hard? Basic stuff like indicating before you slow to turn and maintaining a constant speed are basic concepts but then there are more complex issues like concentrating… I lost count of the drivers I followed who were too busy yakking to their passengers and waving their arms about pointing at cows and trees as their speed slipped further and further down the scale only to see the panic in their eyes when they eventually looked in the mirror and realised their car was going to gain a 64 tonne addition. The other thing too numerous for counting was trailers with blown tyres and often two of them at once. These trailers, caravans etc have obviously sat around all year with tyres that are well beyond their intended safe life only to be loaded to the gunnels and dragged out onto the highway. Why aren’t tyre ages checked? Do people not realise that the materials in their tyres degrade with age and that the manufacture date is written on the sidewall and at most they’ll get six years out of them. Maybe this is another reason why trailer towing should require an additional licence endorsement and licence theory should cover basic vehicle maintenance and inspection procedures. These drivers are heading out onto the roads with equipment that is visibly defective and then overloading that same equipment and nobody is enforcing any common sense. It appears that my driving 15 minutes more in a 14 hour day (less than a 2% increase over the course of a day) is far more dangerous than an overloaded box trailer or caravan with an immanent major equipment failure, both of which are being towed by poorly skilled, fatigued and distracted drivers.

While I’m at it… as I pulled into Archerfield at around 10pm last night there was a Highway Patrol vehicle parked on the verge checking the work diary of a bob-tail truck leaving the area. The way these guys were set up they were there for one purpose, to check fatigue compliance of trucks leaving the Truck Stop. Fair enough, the rules are there for all and like ‘em or not they are the rules but if a truck is leaving the BP, bob-tail, at that time of night the only place he’s going is either somewhere more comfortable or to his depot to get in his car and go home. Where is the ‘crime’ in this, he’s doing just a fraction more than he has all day so that he can get a better rest. Who’s going to be a less fatigued driver the next day when he (or she) heads out amongst the idiots to do it again? Meanwhile the car drivers are drunk, speeding through road works and doing whatever else it is they do and you don’t see a single Candy Car out there… bugger me! Have we forgotten what we’re trying to do? It’s about safety guys.

To the driver at Grafton who tried to suicide under my bull-bar as he pulled out in front of me (as per the Facebook video) go buy yourself a lottery ticket mate, had I been as inattentive as you for a second or two we’d have been waiting together for that familiar dub-dub sound of the chopper coming in to dust you off.

To the guy who got scared because I was up his clacker, sorry Bud, I don’t usually do that but when you overtook on the double lines when I was doing 102kph I thought we had thrown away the rules. I never anticipated that you’d then do 97 in front of me for the next ten minutes (insert sarcastic expression). If you want to throw away the rules that’s fine by me but don’t throw a paddy when the tables are turned, you’ll be scrapping lumps out of your Reg Grundy’s long before me.

To everyone else, have a safe and happy New Year and I look forward to seeing you out here for a most excellent adventure in 2012.

I am a little disappointed though as the response does come across as regurgitated waffle but I’ll let you be the judge…

eWorks05695-2011Signed

Certainly doesn’t address my concerns as well as Warren Truss did, no secret how I’ll vote next time.

• Be patient,
• Take regular breaks,
• Give the heavies plenty of room,
• Maintain a constant speed so others can pass,
• Use your mirrors,
• Minimise distractions,
• Don’t panic if a big one comes up behind, let him do the passing, and
• Be considerate of others, SHARE the road.

Most of all have a great Christmas and I’ll see you in the new year for a bright fresh start.

The pictures below illustrate what can happen when trailers are mismatched. In this case the B-Trailer was a step deck where the chassis rails turn south just as they clear the tow vehicle although in this instance the clearance was insufficient.

Had the driver of this combination tried to visually check the jaws on the turn-table, as he should have after hitching, I’d imagine he would have struggled to get his head between the trailers and maybe, just maybe, he’d have noticed that it wasn’t going to go well. We all make mistakes I guess, the important thing is not to repeat them.

Often these journeys would be punctuated by my father’s speciality, a ‘short cut’. This was a loosely used term often meaning many extra hours spent travelling with the benefit of vistas seldom seen by those that travelled more efficiently. Whilst some of these memories have converged I do recall one such ‘short cut’ concluding with the erection of a tent in a Welsh farmers gateway despite gale force winds and darkness that would have  obscured the vision of one’s own hand had it not been for the constant cracks of lightning directly overhead.

Not that any of us were harmed, we’re all still here even if a little flighty during electrical storms and I learned everything I needed to know about short cuts.

Anyone who was watching the Dash-Cam this afternoon would have witnessed such a journey…

I’d come out of Brisbane with a load of Glyphosphate, bound for Moree and after checking the traffic reports had concluded the the issue of flooding around Boggabilla had eased and the road was open. By the time I climbed the range at Cunningham’s Gap it had become apparent that the road from Warwick to Goondiwindi was closed due to a truck roll-over some thirty kilometres out of town.

Faced with the option of travelling  all the way back across to Toowoomba to join the Gore Highway or down to Tenterfield and taking the Bruxner and seeing as I only have the one trailer on for this trip I headed out past Allora and turned off to Clifton, hoping to get across to Leyburn before re-joining the original route about twenty kilometres past the obstruction.

At Clifton I found another optimistic driver with less knowledge of the roads and he was all too pleased to swing off my coat tails as we headed west, pleased with ourselves that we had broken away from the flock and would soon reap the rewards of our initiative.

As  we turned the corner towards Leyburn our plan came unstuck. The Condamine river had burst it’s banks an the road was well and truly closed.

Not to be perturbed, I hailed the other driver who was at this stage a little ways back and after I reversed to the last junction we set off again. I opted to avoid the river as much as possible and we headed north through Felton and across to Pittsworth before joining the Gore Highway after all.

I doubt we saved any time, in fact we probably lost some but we saw sights seldom seen and witnessing the  Condamine, an icon of outback history,  in full flood is a long way from being marooned in Wales.

Thanks Dad, you taught me everything I know.