Saturday, April 5, 2008

Semi-trailers times four

I don't know if it's just me, all blokes, or anyone from down south, but the fascination with road trains continues, despite seeing hundreds of them each week.
(For those who don't know what a road train is, think of a semi-trailer, double it, and then double it again - one truck, four trailers.)
The tankers are the biggest and baddest of all the trains - 150,000 litres of unleaded, charging along a two-lane highway at 130 kilometres an hour - although the mining trucks, with their raw, reinforced trailers covered in red dust and carrying who-knows-what riches, come a close second.
Along with the gleaming, clean and colour co-ordinated road trains of the big corporate players, like the Shell train above, you also see plenty of owner-operated 'mongrels'; ancient Kenworths or Macks, pulling along four mis-matching trailers with completely different cargo on each one.
New or old, matching or not, they're all still huge (try 50 metres and 62 wheels) - so much so that even my wide-angle lens can't fit the whole thing in.

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