Spardo:
DIG:
Froggy55:
Thanks! That makes roughly the same consumption as three traditional articulated trucks, and the only money saving would be on the cost of the two extra drivers.I.m afraid I can’t agree with you Froggy,the 8 Atkinsons between them based on each truck doing a trip a week Darwin to Alice is a total of 712000 litres per week [rough figure 4.565 litres per gallon]. It would take 20 trips single trailer to deliver the same amount that is assuming the singles could load the same as the dog trailers legally so you would need a lot more trucks on the job to deliver the same volume of fuel in the same time frame.
The rail link between Darwin and Alice has been restored so its possible the fuel is delivered that way now,I travelled with a fuel truck about 10 years ago and the driver told me they are legal with 150000litres using quad trailers on tri axle suspension units.A round trip taking 5 days.
Cheers Dig
You beat me to it Dig, I have a similar picture which I was going to post. The late John Maddock, writing in 1988 wrote of Shell’s then preference for the Mack Superliner with a Mack V8 460 driving through a 9-speed Mack box (that raises my eyebrows because, like you, I fully appreciated the quad box’s 20 pulling a triple full of cows!). They were still triples back then, semi + 2 dogs, but with some safety mods to the braking systems I believe. Also each semi was a tri but the unit and dollys were tandems.
Yes Spardo we had one superliner with a 9 speed box and one with a 12 speed both engines set at 400hp,the 9 speed was so unreliable and used to seize in 2nd gear, Macks finished up supplying a spare gearbox,the 12 speed never gave a problem similar to the quad box but air shift so only one gear stick and I tried to talk the boss into fitting a 12 speed into the other truck but he said while its still under warranty Macks can pay for it we just keep fitting the spare box,we got quite good at it about 5 hours to do the change.When the Macks started doing the Alice run Shell had the draw bars lengthened on the dollys to 14 feet and what a difference that made to the trailers tracking they hardly jigged about at all very smooth and straight to pull.
Dig
