Winter was now getting near, not that there’s much inconvenience in Winters in much of Queensland…

This was right in the midst of a big surge in Covid 19 in a couple of Australian states, but Queensland was keeping its borders shut and Covid was staying out. If I were to get a job taking me out of the state I had to get a pass to allow me back in, this requiring a PCR test not more than a couple of days old.

But most jobs were within Queensland and I didn’t get into New South Wales often at all at this time. And the jobs did start to come quickly, short jobs and long jobs.

6
Down the new bypass. The Toowoomba bypass, known as the ‘Second Range Crossing,’ had been opened while I was in Alice Springs but I hadn’t seen much of it. Doing this job I was to see plenty of it.

The dozer on this load was being taken to an equipment sales yard between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, so that was close enough to enable me to visit Ben while I was down that way. And I got to see him putting a liner into a cylinder block:


Sleeving a block. Having bored the block to suit, the liner is pounded down into place (left) with a pneumatic hammering device. Ultimately the surplus would be cut off when the block was decked (right).

And the next day Darren had me out at 5:30am or so finding a yard at Wellcamp (part of Toowoomba) to pilot a load to Ravenswood. I’d been to Emerald on that previous job up into the area, so my map for this covers just the part of the trip where I’d never been before. The first night out we camped in the large truck parking area behind the Caltex roadhouse at Emerald...


All night service. This road train was just one of a string of trucks which kept calling in that night to refuel. It was a busy place and showed clearly the truth in the saying, ‘Without trucks Australia stops!’

From Emerald, already 500 miles from home, our path would take us a further 350 miles along this path:



But it wasn’t all that simple. The truck operator had been out of business for a while and his trailer’s tyres started giving trouble with this heavy load.


Flat tyre. The driver had been taking it easy because of his concern for the tyres, but along the stretch to Clermont one blew out and he had to change it. Which was hard work.

The load was a major component of a rock crushing machine to be used at a gold mine. It included the largest single-piece casting I’d ever seen, about 16’ in diameter, and that was cast in Spain. But then, I was still new to this business and as the old adage goes, “You haven’t seen anything yet!”

More tyre troubles beset us on the long run from Clermont to Charters Towers, a road so long and lonely that I decided it must be the most boring road in Australia. Certainly, it gave me that impression as we droned along with our truck driver doing his best to protect his tyres.

At Charters Towers it was finally established that all the trailer tyres had been under-inflated – 60psi instead of 100psi. A number of new tyres were purchased and fitted by a local dealer who, fortunately, had the right size in stock.


Tyre service. The mobile tyre service trailer was a welcome sight, but it still took up a lot of the day and held us up for hours. Legs sticking out from beneath the trailer became a common sight.

Ultimately were were able to set off on the final stage to Ravenswood, which is a pretty out-of-the-way place...


Rainbow on Ravenswood road. As the shorter days of late Autumn started to close in, this rainbow might have been seen as an indicator that our troubles were over.

...and the gold mine even more so. We lined the vehicles up for a triumphal photograph before the truck alone went into the minesite to make the delivery. Which, of course, wouldn’t be unloaded until the next morning.


Triumph. The three pilot vehicles and the truck lined up just outside the mine. The job was done, the first job for this contractor in some long time.

A couple of us went into the ‘town’ of Ravenswood. Clearly, this place had been a boom town when gold was first mined here and the size of the pub showed that there’d been some money around:


Ravenswood Hotel. It was dark when we got there and the pub lit up handsomely. The mean was just what we needed after a long day.

Actually, the pub was right next door to a place with a collection of American vehicles of various ages, so I had a bit of a look around them. But getting home was the next thing to consider and after filling my stomach I headed off, back through Charters Towers and onto that boring road. Along the way I noted that Jenn, one of the other pilots, had pulled off to sleep on the side of the road.

I went a little further and camped in a rest area. In the morning I waited to see if Jenn would come through, but after wasting over an hour I decided to get going South. Through Clermont, where I refuelled, and then into the little town of Capella, where I stopped in their nice park located between the highway and the railway to boil up some water for coffee and cook myself some food for lunch.


Capella’s bottle trees. These trees lined a small section of the park, which must be about a mile long, and I thought them worth a pic.

Driving on into the afternoon I passed through Emerald and noted the setting sun casting its colour onto this formation near Springsure:


Formation in the late sun. So many different shapes present themselves in this area of Queensland and they change in character as the sun moves through its daily arc.

During the following days we had an eclipse of the moon visible from much of Australia. This type of eclipse was called a ‘blood moon’ because the moon appears to turn red once the earth blocks the sun. I went up to a local lookout on the North side of Toowoomba in the hope of getting some photos...


Eclipse stages. As the earth’s shadow passed over the moon I got some reasonably clear shots...


Blood Moon? ...but when the red tinge was there the camera simply wouldn’t focus on it.

I was home for a few days and went up to the Men’s Shed, on the way back I bought a meat pie to eat and stopped at Mt Kynoch to enable me to eat it hot. From the park there I got this shot looking down the range:


Mount Kynoch view. Toowoomba’s position at the top of the range is clear here, with the sharp drop to the lower countryside being the reason for the ‘Second Range Crossing’ mentioned previously.

The steep climb from Withcott to Toowoomba has been a slow drag for trucks, and with so many trucks having to pass through Toowoomba to reach more Western destinations the traffic on the highway through the city was untenable. The new bypass has cut travel time for the trucks by over twenty minutes and taken thousands of semi-trailers off Toowoomba’s streets every day.

I’d been looking for some time to find something from which I could make a replacement for the cracked gearchange socket for the NV4500, a plastic item I really wouldn’t have expected on such a rugged transmission. One day I spotted these in my shed...


Raw materials. The cast aluminium axle tubes from Peugeot rear axles got me thinking and measuring, and soon this would pay dividends.

...and I took the axle shafts out and got serious with confirming dimensions. They are a Peugeot 504 station wagon axle tube on the left and a Peugeot 404 sedan axle tube on the right, it would be the wagon version which would prove to be useful, with a trip to the place where I’d obtained the Acetal and obtained a piece from which I could use in conjunction with the housing I’d make from the axle tube.


Gearchange in embryo. With the broken original plastic piece on the left, this is the end I cut from the wagon axle tube and the piece of Acetal I bought to fit inside it and from which I could machine out the detail.

A great many hours would be required to get this job finished, but I felt confident I’d gone in the right direction in view of the state of the original piece.

The following week I had only a couple of local jobs, then as we moved towards the middle of June I got my first job piloting a grain silo:


Taking up the bridge. The Ahrens silos are five metres wide and so a narrow bridge is soon taken up as we cross it.

These silo jobs were interesting because of the loading and unloading methods, which required special hydraulics, and the trailers which kept the silo low to the ground when on the move. Additionally, the safety cages around the ladders were assembled progressively as the silo was lifted in stages to allow that.

In this particular case the farmer had to remove a gatepost to enable the truck to get into position to put the silo onto the new concrete pad which had been laid for it, while battling with the muddy conditions presented further challenges.


Lifting the silo. The hydraulic rams do their job of lifting the silo into position, it would soon be bolted down and ready for use.

As this delivery was to Nanango I decided to drop in and see Lawry, a friend who’d moved to this area from Stanthorpe. He was usually doing something interesting with cars and his daughter had bought a Rambler Rebel which needed an engine. Lawry grafted in a SOHC engine from a Ford Falcon:


Falcon into Rambler. This engine is similar to the one in Sandra’s ‘94 Falcon and it fitted well into the Rambler’s engine bay.

At this time the Covid situation had caused new regulations to be implemented. Numbers of people allowed into shops and other public places became limited and ‘social distancing’ became a common requirement. The local Aldi supermarket here is a good example of how it looked:


‘Social distancing.’ The requirement was that people stay about five feet apart in these circumstances. This queue is forming as the shop is not yet open.

And still on the subject of Covid, vaccinations had begun a few months earlier and I was hoping to get my shots before too long. But I didn’t want to get the Astra-Zeneca shots and waited until the Pfyzer version was available. As vaccinations were being tightly controlled, booking was required and locations with the Pfyzer shots were limited.

I had booked in for one but I had the awkward situation that I’d had a ’flu shot just over a week earlier. In Australia we weren’t permitted to have the Covid shot within two weeks of having a ’flu vaccine, but I booked in the hope that it would be okay. The centre where I went was the Baillie Henderson hospital in Toowoomba...


Vaccination centre. Temporary fencing and queue-guiding arrangements at the Baillie Henderson hospital enabled the nurses to control crowds arriving for vaccinations.

...but they wouldn’t bend on the two-week requirement. I went back a frustrating few weeks later without an appointment and, because it was the end of the day and they had doses left over, I finally got my first shot.

Before that, however, I had a call from another agent for the piloting work. “Can you come up to Emerald to do a job down to Millmerran?” Ron McNamara asked me. Of course he got an answer in the affirmative and I set out to drive to Emerald.


Rainbow and rain. The drive to Emerald took a day, but that’s pretty normal. It really doesn’t matter whether you drive to the distant start of a job or go home from the distant finish.

What I was seeing at this time, with all those miles covered in the coalfields areas particularly, was the way that gum trees – eucalypts – recover after long droughts. I’d seen this previously in trees recovering from fires, but I never knew it was also true of trees which appeared to have died in long dry periods.


New sprouts. From the trunk and from the lower parts of limbs there are new sprouts with leaves to provide the transpiration necessary for the tree to recover as moisture returns to the ground after drought.

There were many of these trees and I tried to capture the phenomena as it manifested itself in lone trees and in stands of what had looked a time earlier as dead trees.


Returning to life. The tree in the foreground here has got through the drought in good shape, but others around it were only just getting going again after looking like they’d died.


Back from the dead. These trees look way too solid to have such small clusters of leaves coming from their trunks and major limbs, but were among the many which showed the marvellous natural recovery method of the eucalypts.

I joined the small crew with the big machine at a holding yard just outside Emerald and introduced myself. In time I’d do a lot of work for Ron, his work was a good back-up for the work I was getting from Darren, but this job would turn out to be a bit different.


Big machine. This machine with its huge bucket sits atop an 8-row platform being hauled by a Mercedes prime mover. The outside wheels on the platform were set at 4.2 metres. It was an early morning start and we’d find parts of the journey a bit of an adventure.

It was just over 500 miles for the job, it would take most of two days in the middle of June. The first obstacle we had to face was that the platform was too wide for the roadworks on the road we’d normally take from Emerald to Rolleston.

But that wouldn’t be the only obstacle we’d face...

 

As mentioned, we had to take that loader another way as the road from Springsure to Rolleston was being rebuilt at the Rolleston end. This work had been going on for months and would continue for a long time, but for much of that time they made provision for loads like this to pass through.

So we had to take the Capricorn Highway to Blackwater, then head down the direct road from there to Rolleston:



This road, however, is not quite the highway standard and normally not used by wide loads. And it adds the complication of having to cross the railway where there are overhead wires to power the trains, something which isn’t present at the level crossing at Emerald.

The arrangements which had to be made at Blackwater were time-consuming. Coal trains are running regularly along that line, taking coal to the port at Gladstone for export, as well as other rail movements:


Blackwater crossing. A pair of locomotives fill the crossing as the truck with its huge load can be seen waiting on the other side.

The railway people had to be contacted to arrange for them to turn off the power on that section of the line (covering tens of miles, I understand) and the platform’s airbags deflated to bring the height of the load down. The load had been measured at 5.4 metres, the signs on the level crossing said that clearance was a mere 5.2 metres, so it was still going to be close.

All of this took time, time enough to notice other things going on locally…


HG Monaro. This Holden was the same model which won the Bathurst 500 back in 1970 sporting 350 Chevrolet power. It appeared to be having some restoration work done.

…while all the while our need was to get on along the road. And the road, as mentioned, was not normally supposed to carry loads like ours. Of course, once across the railway the platform had to be raised again to normal ride height.

It was my first experience of this road and I was to find it enjoyable. The reason for this was that we would, after dropping through a tight and steep pinch, be travelling opposite the cliffs on the Western side of the Blackdown National Park and when I saw these I realised it was a sight worth seeing:


Blackdown’s cliffs. Though it was a dull day, and the wrong time of day, it was obvious to me that the cliffs of Blackdown National Park would make a fine sight in the afternoon sun. I made a mental note to be coming by here at that time one day.

As can be seen, the road is narrow. Fortunately, traffic is also light, almost non-existent, which is highlighted in a pic from Reilly’s big trip, featured about a dozen posts ago. In the pic he took – https://i.postimg.cc/CLVd2RWC/19-32-...blackwater.jpg – he’s quite near the same place as I was when I took the one above.

The light traffic might account for the interest taken in us by some of the local fauna:


Emus on the watch. Four emus watch us drive by. They’re behind a fence, if threatened they would soon be running towards that hill in the background.

We duly rolled into Rolleston where we stopped after a slow and somewhat stressful morning’s run. The truck drivers go around the load and check for loosening chains, tyre problems and so on, and these things plus some refreshments meant that the centre-parking in the main street featured this huge machine for a while.


Rolleston relief. Parked in the centre of the main street, it’s clear here how the rearmost sets of wheels steer to avoid tyre scrub, this is achieved with linkages attached to the turntable.

As can be seen in that picture, and more so in this one, the clouds were starting to disperse and we had a sunny Winter’s day to enjoy the balance of our drive…


Sky clearing. Back on a highway, the Carnarvon, the road was wider and the brightening sky helped out as we were able to maintain a better speed.

…which would enable us to get 600kms behind us for the day, which would end at Dulacca:



But I did say something about obstacles and there was another one coming. About 100kms out of Rolleston the Carnarvon Highway climbs steeply up a hill known as ‘Wallaroo’, and with sections of Armco railing and a cutting or two, it’s presents something of a challenge to pilots of loads like this one – 5.4 metres wide.

But worse was to come. Recall that the reason we’d gone down the Rolleston road was to avoid the roadworks on the road from Springsure, when we stopped at the Rest Area at the top of the hill a lot of people, mostly travelling ‘grey nomads’, took a keen interest in our load.

And then one said to us, “I don’t know how you’ll get through the roadworks just down the road here!” This was all news to us, then he continued, “They’ve got the road dug away each side with just enough room for a regular truck to get through.”

He was describing exactly the situation which had existed on the other road and we set out towards it with trepidation, the wheels on the platform were set at 4.2 metres wide, a call to the road workers revealed that they had left 4.4 metres of bitumen. Our driver, Darren, reckoned he could drive on it, but soon learned that the edges were falling away as he did.


On a lean. Having reversed back off the central bitumen when he found it wasn’t holding, Darren (and the roadworkers) worked out that this was the way he’d have to bring the load through!

This leads readily into a bit of an explanation about these roadworks. Or at least what I’ve surmised about them.

This picture, on the road from Rolleston to Moura, shows that the road is at a normal (if skimpy) two-lane width, but that the underpinnings of the outer edges are not as secure as the centre:


Centre safer. Along a stretch of over 15kms, these signs direct traffic to stay on the centre of the road while they’re able to do so.

It seems to me that the roads in the area had been laid out as single-lane and the boom in mining, particularly, led to widening being hurriedly done to a lesser standard. So now we were seeing sections being properly underpinned at full width.


Dulacca camp. After an interesting day we pulled up for the night at Dulacca, the parking bay opposite the roadhouse being empty at the time.

The roadhouse provided us with a pretty decent meal and there were a few others there with whom we could strike up conversations, but we’d had an early start and it wasn’t long before the thought of a fitful night’s sleep led us to our respective vehicles to let this happen.



We only had 320kms to go and there was the complication that we had to book a police escort for our drive through Dalby. Dulacca to Dalby would take us about three hours with a stop at Miles for fuel, so that was organised and dictated the time at which we’d be on our way in the morning.


Police at Dalby. Loads of this size can only proceed through Dalby with a police escort, here the details are checked by the officer involved and soon the load would be on the move again.

With the police escort I was sent ahead as my presence wasn’t required again until the restricted area was cleared, then we weren’t far from the end of the trip, just 105kms to go. And at Millmerran I wasn’t all that far from home, either, and the very next day I had a job from Darren which would take me over the border. I had to have a Covid test and get a border pass organised, which was easily accomplished.

This job was another of the 5-metre wide silos and was going to a farm just across the border out of Boggabilla. There was a lot of mud about, but it was just about dry enough to get the truck in and stand the silo on the waiting concrete pad…


Larger silo. This delivery was a larger one than the one previously erected. But another of the larger ones was standing by to be put in place after having been delivered when there was too much mud to get the truck into situ.

It was getting on towards lunch time and as I drove away the news came over the radio that a couple who’d crossed the border illegally from NSW to Queensland had been given stiff fines for their trouble. Along the way they’d infected others, which is how they were found out, and retracing their steps led to the McDonalds at Goondiwindi, where they’d stopped on their way through.

There was jubilation in the store when I broke the news to them. They’d been put through hoops, staff members were still off-work due to the exposure and others had bitter memories of the ‘deep cleaning’ they’d had to do.


McDonalds Goondiwindi. This is often the first port of call for people travelling from Victoria and NSW after crossing the Queensland border.

There was only one small job for me in the next ten days and I had the opportunity to go to the Men’s Shed and see how things were progressing. The Nuttall lathe had been bolted to the floor and powered up and Nicol had busied himself adapting a 3-jaw chuck which the previous owner had always intended using.


3-Jaw chuck. Not only did Nicol adapt this to the lathe, but he machined the jaws so they were perfectly parallel. The chuck also has some fine adjustments which are obtained by working with the adjusters which angle into the body of the chuck.

And proceeding with work on the gearchange for the B350, I worked on the mill to replicate the detail in the plastic socket in a piece of the Acetal I’d machined to fit into the alloy housing I was making.


Milled to shape. After shaping a lathe tool to get the right internal curvature, my next step was to recreate the detail shown in the plastic socket. The large reliefs are for the pieces which prevent the lever turning, but naturally enough need room to move from side to side. Rough edges would be trimmed with a knife.

The alloy housing, being shaped out of a Peugeot axle tube if you recall, needed some work on the mill too:


More milling. The step taken here is to re-create the triangular pieces just visible in the plastic socket which locate the steel cover which holds the springs in place to keep the lever in the socket.

I was fairly happy with the way it was coming together, but I now faced the challenge of drilling and tapping holes into the housing and they couldn’t be very large. I used 3/16" UNC and soon found how brittle the taps were, breaking two of them in the holes and necessitating a change of plans.

But that would be between jobs. Another nice long one came up on July 1, a simple semi-trailer with tyres on board for a dump truck, just a little too wide to travel without a pilot, Ron sent me down to Archerfield, in the outer suburbs of Brisbane, to escort it to Newlands mine, about 1,280kms and a job which required an overnight stop.


At Taroom. We camped here for the night, getting a meal at the local pub. Amenities in the Rest Area at Taroom are quite good and I’ve camped here a couple of times now.

With the job done I returned to Nebo to refuel, then decided to travel home even though it was dark. It got worse than that, torrential rain falling along the ‘Beef Road’, the development road between Nebo and Dingo, but I plugged on and covered a lot of miles that night and stopped quite late along the road.

After putting in some fuel at Taroom I was enjoying an easy run along the Leichhardt Highway when I was whisked off the road by a police escort…


Making way. There was a police escort on each of these loads, dump truck bodies heading North. Safe haven was on the grass verge out of their way.

…and waited while the two dump truck bodies went by. Further along the road was wet from the overnight rain…


Road wet. They hadn’t had as much rain as I’d seen the night before, but there was still more of the weather about as I headed towards Miles.

…which I was told wasn’t nearly as heavy as I’d experienced further North.

Just one day at home and Ron called again. Didn’t I say I needed the work to come more quickly? This wasn’t as long a job and I had to drive up to Moura to start it, but it was still a job to help pay some bills.


8-row platform. The Komatsu machine was heavy enough to warrant the platform plus the dolly on this trip to Nebo.

We were to face more obstacles with this one, the first being that it was delayed in loading. Then there were no police available for the Westwood to Duaringa stretch, where a tight climb necessitates police accompaniment. So we would be going on the (narrower) road from Moura to Rolleston, then up the same road to Blackwater I’d come down a couple of weeks earlier.


Blackdown cliffs. Once again I saw those Blackdown cliffs, and again without the light coming from the right direction!

But the steep and tight pinch we’d come down with the load going to Millmerran was now to be tackled in the opposite direction. Which is why I got to take this photo:


Dolly all alone. The decision was made to reduce the overall weight that had to come up the steep pinch by removing the dolly temporarily.

So the driver unhooked the platform, towed the dolly up the pinch and parked it in a handy gravelled area, then he returned to get the platform. The delays added up to a problem we’d have to face further up the road…

 

And so the heavy machinery was brought up the pinch and onto level ground. It’s possible that the tightness of the final turn was another reason the driver opted to do things this way, eliminating the dolly giving him a tighter turn.

While he’d been coming up the pinch I had the job of holding back any oncoming traffic, but there was none. Now he was ready to reassemble things for the rest of the journey…


Onto the higher ground. The truck arrives with the other pilots and is parked on the gravelled area alongside the dolly.

…a job requiring a lot of electrical, hydraulic and air lines to be hooked up as well as simply joining the dolly to the truck and the trailer to the dolly:


Resetting the trailer. The trailer’s steering mechanism has to be aligned, all the lines hooked up and then the ride height of the trailer adjusted with its airbag suspension.

And so we resumed the trip, into Blackwater, across the railway line there, then head East to Dingo where we’d join the Fitzroy Developmental Road to cover the bulk of the miles to Nebo. This was the road I’d driven down a few nights earlier in torrential rain.

The road was fine, but anyone getting off the blacktop was in danger of trouble. We saw this illustrated well when we came across this scene:


Bogged truck. Two heavy tow trucks work together to get this semi-trailer out of the mire on the side of the road. Of course, they had to work on the sealed surface.

In brief conversation over the 2-way we learned that this was the second truck they’d had to extricate from such a predicament since that rain. They kindly put themselves into a position so we could get safely by.

It was getting dark by the time we reached the end of the Developmental Road (known also as the ‘Beef Road’) and we pulled up there to consider our position. We were now a week into July and the sun sets very early at this time of year, and we’re restricted to running only in daylight. But there is a provision to keep going to 7pm if the load will reach its final destination in that time.

So the driver turned on the worklights at the back of the truck’s cab to light up the load to enable oncoming traffic to see the load and we turned onto the Peak Downs Highway for the short run to the finish.


Late arrival. This picture shows how the truck’s worklights illuminate the load, and also that it was actually dark when we reached the yard where the machine was going.

The machine was unchained, fired up and unloaded…


Unloading. Helpers at the destination guide the driver as he unloads the machine, its lights being bright enough to turn night into day. Our job was now done.

I drove on into Nebo and camped at the little rest area there, the next morning I was due in Mackay as Ron had another job for me.

This was a short one, from Mackay – where I’d never been before and had to try hard not to get lost, but managed it anyway – to a mine along the Peak Downs Highway a little West of Nebo. I didn’t get much of a chance to look over the machinery involved, but it was just a part of something huge.


‘Digger upper deck.’ That’s how it was described and I imagine it was a machine which had to be assembled on site. A big machine. Here we climb the steep pinch out of Mackay as one of the multitude of trucks carting molasses goes past us.

I had been, from the very beginning, somewhat enthralled by the machinery involved in all of this work. From the trucks and trailers with their hydraulics and air-operated gear to the machines and parts of machines we carted, particularly the mining gear.

But my time traipsing around the coalfields of Queensland also enabled me to see a lot of landforms with which I was not familiar. Ron asked me to go from the end of this job to Clermont, where he had another job for me, along the way I got pics of these monoliths poking up out of the otherwise relatively flat landscape:


Monoliths. There are some fascinating shapes out there, remnants of volcanic activity long ago, I guess. This part of Queensland abounds with such things.

But the job at Clermont was cancelled, with me sitting at the minesite not knowing what was going on. Ron then asked me to go into Emerald for a job the next morning. I went in to the roadhouse where we’d stopped on that trip to Ravensworth and camped in a quiet corner out the back.

In the morning I joined up with a lady pilot to escort a truck with a 10-row platform. These are so wide in their static position that they can’t move without two pilots, when widened or carrying a wide enough load they require three, and in some cases police escorts as well. Our job was to escort the rig to the Ensham mine and, once it was loaded, take it on to another destination.


National Heavy Haulage 10-row. Parked at the mine site, the truck was gleaming but the driver had to attend to some small issues with tyres.

I offered to help the driver change some tyres but he made it very clear that he preferred to work on his own. So I got a pic or two of the truck and the suspension and…


Platform suspension. Each set of four wheels are mounted on stub axles at the base of units like this, some of which are steerable. Airbags carry all the weight.

…left there and went to nearby Blackwater to get myself a meat pie. Soon I got a call saying that there’d been an error in the paperwork and that the job had to be cancelled until that was corrected.

Apparently someone had written down the wrong height for the load on the application for the job, forgetting to add in the height of the platform. I can imagine that would have been a problem as I understood that this machine was to be the load:


Cancelled load. With the jibs folded down, this would still have been a high load, but I was off the job now and would never learn the outcome.

I finished up just cruising around the Blackwater/Bluff area, at one stage finding a set of keys sitting on a fencepost at a Rest Area, I took these to the police at Dingo in the hope that they might find their owner somehow. And at the end of the day Ron called and said he wanted me to be at Moura for a job going to Westwood early the next morning. So I camped at the Rest Area at Moura that night.


Loading technique. The small dump trucks are carried whole, so by driving them up on ramps with their inner rear wheels removed they are high enough for the platform to reverse back under them.

As I was there early I was able to watch the whole procedure. Timber blocks were put onto the platform and jacks used to raise the dump truck off its ramps and then lower it onto the blocks…


Blocks in. Once the truck is settled on the blocks, chains are used to anchor it and it’s ready to roll.

It was only a short trip, under 70 miles, but we still struck traffic on the Leichhardt Highway. This road carries a lot of oversize loads because it provides the shortest access to the mining areas from Brisbane and Toowoomba and lots of machinery is being moved about.


Passing another wide load. I was running at the rear this trip and was able to get a good shot of us passing an oncoming load of similar dimensions.

I’d decided that if Ron was going to continue giving me work I’d stay in the area doing whatever came up until there was a job which headed me home. I based myself at Emerald, camping some nights at the back of the roadhouse and staying in one of the cheap motels other nights.

During this time I came across this nice Valiant in the Woolworths car park and when I started looking it over the owner came out and moved it to a better spot for me to get some shots. 2-door Valiants first came out in Australia in the model before this one and they weren’t a common sight.


VF 2-door. I suspect it was originally a slant 6 model, but this VF – 1968/69 – was a very smart-looking car and had a 318 installed. By the way, there’s a lens-smudge on the camera of which I wasn’t aware and it spoils a few photos.

With some pride he opened the bonnet and let me have a look at how he’s set up the 318…


Nice 318. Alloy rocker covers stand out under there, while overall it’s a very tidy sight and a credit to him.

The VF had the slightly longer nose than the American counterpart, the 1967/68 Dart, which sold here as the VE. The length was added in anticipation of the upcoming Hemi-6 engines, a very small number of which were fitted to the last of the VFs.

On the following day I did a short-haul job for Ron, then the next day he asked me to go out to the Centurion Transport yard and meet up with the driver who was to take the 7-row platform out that day.


7-row at Centurion. The dolly is up on the truck ready to be used when needed, the inset shows the reduction hubs fitted to this truck.

Once again I had the opportunity to take note of the technical aspect of things. These reduction hubs weren’t fitted to the truck which had to remove the dolly to get up the Blackdown pinch, but quite a number of the trucks do have them. I notice that they are always slower, even though their other gearing would still enable regular highway speeds, and I conclude that they must create a lot of drag.

This job was a long one, with an overnight stay even before we loaded up, it was about 260 miles to the Pajingo goldmine where we were picking up a D11 minus its blade. We camped out along the private road which leads into the mine, in the morning we were awoken by busloads of workers coming in for their day’s toil.

The dolly was then fitted up and we went in to load up. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere interesting and sat around near the office buildings to wait for the truck to be ready to roll. After turning in at Belyando Crossing and taking the gravel roads that go via Mt Coolon we went to Moranbah where we stopped for a break and to refuel at the roadhouse.


Pajingo’s D11. This machine was travelling minus blade as it would be returning to the mine after some serious refurbishing.

Though it seemed that we could make it the rest of the way to Sarina, we stopped at Nebo that second night. Dinner at the pub led me to see this old Austin truck on a more modern truck, parked across the road when I left:


Austin gets a ride. Dating back to the fifties, this Austin has probably served out much of its life on a farm somewhere.

We had trouble with the brakes on the dolly when we left Nebo the next morning. One of them was locking on and the driver had a lot of trouble getting it to work properly. He didn’t want to disconnect it as there is a steep hill down to Mackay and that might be dodgy with this load. We dropped off South of Mackay at Sarina, then later in the day Ron had me pilot the empty platform back to Centurion’s yard at Paget, a bit closer to Mackay.

The next day I expected to be doing one of the many loads of railway lines being taken out to the new (and controversial) Adani coal mine. I went down to the port and watched as the many loads left without me:


Rails by road. Every day nine or ten loads were leaving from the port at Mackay as the Adani railway progressed closer and closer to the mine, being developed to the West of the Gregory Development Road.

So I spent the day finding my way around Mackay, I bought a pair of new tyres for the Territory and found a good place to get a shower free if you refuelled there, another place for meals and somewhere I could sit back in private and use the internet while recharging the laptop and phones.

Ron told me that I’d be on a big job the next morning and that I should be at the Centurion base at Paget quite early.


Early start. The load is the chassis of a large dump truck and the size of it required a lot of personnel as we set off on the trip to Moura.

There was, in fact, two of them. I was attached to the back of the second in line while out in front were people to take care of low-hanging power lines and with each of the loads there was a police escort to help ‘encouraging’ oncoming traffic to get off the road.

As we worked our way around the route we had to follow through Homebush, between the cane farms, we pulled over into the child drop-off area of a school to let the tipping bodies go by on other trucks. They were much lighter and slightly lower, so didn’t require the wire-lifting crews which were slowing us down.

And they wouldn’t, when the time came for them to climb the hill out of Mackay, need a second prime mover…


Second prime mover added. At the bottom of the climb the second prime mover, which had weights over its drive wheels, was hitched up to help up the hill. This was after it had assisted the first truck in the same way.

…which was only required for a mile and a half or so. But it took time to hook up and then detach, with the trip back in between adding further time. Not only that, we lost our police escort when a car came by and took the wrong lane up the hill! Our policeman raced up the right road and gave him a ticket for his inept activity!


Up the hill. With plenty of fog around, the trucks had their engines working in unison as they climbed the hill out of Mackay.

And to add to the technical detail, the Liebherr T264 weighs in (when assembled) at 176 tons, has a payload of 240 tons and has a Cummins V16 which punches out around 2,700 horsepower. This drives a generator which powers the wheels as it drives up to 55kmh. In my next post I’ll include photos of some of the detail which I found fascinating.

Also fascinated by the sight of these machines heading up the Peak Downs Highway were all the motorists who had to pull up for us to pass…


Cars pulled up. With a load this size, and with the police escort, all oncoming vehicles were off the road as we went by.

Many people got out of their cars and had their phones and cameras up filming and photographing the machine going by them, it was amazing.


Wire lifters. On the front of their vehicles they have a gauge set at the height needed to clear the load, if it hits a wire they stop and lift it up for the load to pass.

On the stretch from Clermont to Capella they were pretty busy as we passed a number of small farms with homes close to the road . This lifting rod has two wire holders on it, but overnight we’d see some more sophisticated gear used by this team...


Two at a time. The wire people have an array of different items to suit different situations. They ran two vehicles with two men in each, leap-frogging as was needed.

We pulled up for the night just out of Emerald. Night? Well, not really. We’d been on the road since 4:30am and we stopped about eleven hours later, so it was no later than mid-afternoon. But we were going to hit the road again at 2:30am for the difficult job of getting through Emerald and everyone needed to get some rest for that early start.

Eric, the driver of the truck I was with, had his wife come out in their turbocharged Forester to pick him up and take him home to a comfy bed, his youngster was happy daddy was home this night…

 

The machinery used, as I have said, was fascinating me. In fact, from the very first job I’d been taking close notice of the machines and the transporting trailers and platforms. That was the first time I’d seen one of these tracked tractors up close and the same applied to trucks with hydraulic widening arrangements.


First job curiosities. This truck widened out its deck, but the wheels remained at the standard width, the tractor not only had rubber tracks but was articulated, all new to me.

Apart from my curiosity when it came to mechanical devices, as time moved on I came to the conclusion that this sort of thing would appeal to Bob Britton. I speak to him on the phone regularly and, in talking about these things, it was clear that getting photos for him would give him some opportunity for mental stimulation in his now near-incapacitated situation.

So getting back to the job transporting the Liebherr dump truck chassis, we left the yard where we’d camped for the night. This is an area where space is provided for the breaking-down of road trains, so trailers can be left and picked up by other trucks and so on. We only had a short distance into town before we had to turn into back streets because clearances were tight in the main streets.


Wires in Emerald. This is the street into which we turned from the highway, note the profusion of overhead wires, all of which had to be lifted to allow us to pass. It was a slow process.

Lifting wires one or two at a time was simple, but here we had one set of four or five wires crossing the road. The wire men had a tool for this, each wire settling into insulated ‘cups’ on a horizontal bar while their vertical post was wound up with a crank-like device.

Gradually we worked our way through the streets of Emerald, then struck out along the Capricorn Highway. At Comet there were more troublesome wires and some of the cars being held up tried to force their way past, which was a danger to the wire men. But in time the town was cleared and we went on to Blackwater, Bluff, Dingo and Duaringa.

It was at Duaringa we stopped for breakfast and I got the chance to take detailed photos of the machine:


Huge disc brake. Not only are the discs huge, the cailpers are large as well and there are five of them on each disc!

And everywhere you look on the machine there are hydraulic lines, compressed air lines and electrical wiring.

Note also that the front suspension is, in principle, not terribly different to an automotive setup, a shorter top control arm than the lower control arm, just made with pieces which each need a forklift or crane to lift into place. But there is some consideration given to the weight…


Hollow-cast LCA. A closer look at the lower control arm shows that it’s a hollow casting, no doubt all the arms are made in a similar fashion.

…which is only natural in a machine weighing in at a massive 176 tons.

A further look at the calipers is in the next shot, which is mainly to do with the steering. Brake pads must be heavy (and very expensive!) and not a kind to be kept on the shelf at your local brake specialists’ workshop.


Power steering. It’s no surprise, either, that the steering is powered. These steering links are likewise massive components. At the end of the ‘tie rod’ is a very large spherical rod end.

Those cylinders to the right look like they’re hydraulic oil reservoirs while the hydraulic ram activating the steering is yet another oversize component.


Like a Mustang or Falcon. The suspension load is taken via the upper control arm, like the old Falcons and Mustangs, but it appears to use either airbag or hydraulics to lift the machine.

Anyone want a job undoing all those nuts? Rings of nuts and bolts abound on the machine, while you can see above heavy electrical cables heavily guarded against damage. I did mention nuts and bolts…


Rear axle. Within this outer housing is the electric drive for the machine, all of which provides massive power to the wheels at the driver’s demand.

…to both keep the housing together and to attach the massive rear wheels. Also visible here are the upper and lower links which control the axle’s movement.

I keep using the word ‘massive’, and in relation to the power available to drive the machine it truly is. 4,425 horsepower is available from the ‘Litronic Plus AC drive system’ to move it about, which might be needed when the whole laden weight (416 tons!) has to start moving up a steep ramp or hill.


Rear suspension. The machine uses more of the same type of units as on the front to carry the weight over the rear, while the top link is a little clearer in this picture.

The thing about the machine which really struck me was the abundance of electrical controls. The diesel engine merely generates AC electrical power to provide the motive forces needed everywhere on this chassis. And, naturally, they need to have controls:


Control cabinets. These are located right next to the driver’s cockpit, undoubtedly being filled with things like circuit breakers and gauges.

And alongside it was another set of cabinets…


More cabinets. I’m not totally sure, but I suspect these have something to do with the hydraulics. While I could look at things from the ground, I never got to climb aboard and have a closer inspection.

Did I mention climbing aboard? There are ladders and gangways and safety railings to get to things like the cockpit and the controls:


One of the ladders. This is what the driver ascends to go to work, or a workman who’s got to check out the equipment on board.

And at the heart of it all is the Cummins V16. It’s their QSK60 engine and generator combination, the pistons displace 60 litres, its 6.26” bore and 7.5” giving that power at engine speeds somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000rpm.

But it’s not visible at all as you look at the machine, the only indication that it’s there being the exhausts…


Evidence of power. The twin exhaust pipes come out the side of the machine over the right front suspension.

…coming out the side. The whole unit is buried deep inside the framework and behind its huge radiators.

And so, having had breakfast at Duaringa we continued on the Capricorn Highway to Westwood, then turned right for the final stretch down the Leichhardt Highway to the mine which was awaiting their new charges.


Leichhardt roadworks. The stretch from Westwood to Biloela was subject to a lot of improvement works during 2021 and here we drive past a grader getting on with that job.

Once at the mine I was told to cool my heels while the machine was unloaded as I was to pilot the empty platform back to its base in Emerald. During that time I had a bit of a look around, though I wasn’t allowed into the mine property at all.


Mountain of overburden. The mines at Moura are twenty miles long, driving on the parallel section of the Leichhardt Highway one can look to the West anywhere along there and see the continuous ‘mountain range’ of overburden.

This particular mine, or part of the mine, is the Anglo American Metallurgical Coal mine, one of five mines they operate. The coal from here is the quality needed to use in steel-making. And they turn out lots of it…


Old dump truck. As I waited I saw several of these running along the ridge beside the mine, it’s not as large as the one we’d just delivered, however.

…with trucks running about tipping it onto…


Conveyor system. This covered conveyor runs for miles alongside the mine, ultimately delivering the coal to the railway coal-loading siding.

…a seemingly endless conveyor system which rumbles away taking away the coal.

After a long wait, Eric brought the empty platform out and we headed off towards Emerald. He was going to be too late to tuck his boy into bed this night due to delays unloading.

I camped back at the roadhouse again and, without any work looming, I set out to drive home. Along the way I encountered yet another dump truck chassis heading towards the mining areas:


Northbound. Yet another Centurion platform heads towards the mining areas with a dump truck chassis on board. The police had no trouble getting me to pull off the side of the road here.

This was South of Taroom, and a little further on there was more reason to pull over as machinery kept coming towards me.

Two bulldozers, maybe D11-sized, gave cause for the traffic on the narrow highway to pull to the side and watch them go by.


Two dozers. The machinery was coming thick and fast on this day and the police escorts were busy too.

When you see loads like these, with solid parts sticking way out beyond the limits of the trucks, you can appreciate that dangers are lurking out there for the unwary. And dangers, too, for the scenery if the driver misjudges, as would appear to have happened here:


Post shattered. At some time or another something has hit this concrete post and broken the top off it.

I stopped at Wandoan cemetery as I’d found that there are two virtually unused water tanks there, plenty of fresh water to top up my drinking containers for the balance of the trip home. Fuel went into the tank at Miles and that put me on the road past the camping ground where I was surprised to see a couple of Chamberlain tractors.

Publicity for ‘Tail End Charlie’ in 1954 probably contributed most to this fascination with the old machines. John Cummins, an employee of Chamberlain’s, followed the around-Australia reliability trial to drag people out of bogs and help them out if they were in trouble. His tractor was geared for a top speed of around 60mph.


Chamberlains. Chamberlains made some good quality tractors and they’ve no gained a bit of a following. These ones were on a long journey right around the country towing their caravans.

And so I had a few days at home. During that time I was determined to get my first Covid vaccination, the problem I’d had to date being that I refused to have the Astra-Zeneca shot because of its (admittedly slight) risk of causing clotting. I went to a couple of places but they insisted on appointments and, anyway, were very short on stocks.

So I once again tried the Baillie Henderson hospital. And when I got there it was just before closing time and found that they could let me in because they had some Pfyzer doses left over that they couldn’t keep for the next day. And so I beat, finally, the need to make an appointment.

Inevitably I got a call then for another job, delivering a pre-fab house section, and once again it was one which presented me with some interesting machinery to ponder.


Praying mantis? That was what I thought of when I saw how this was built. The ‘gooseneck’ section of the trailer lays down so the house section can be rolled on along with a tractor to position the section on-site…


Pins at ready. …and then the hydraulics come into play, lifting it all up to operating height and pins seen here in the men’s hands each side of the trailer are locked into place.

The job would take us out through Roma and Barcaldine, then back towards Emerald to a place called Jericho. We had to travel via some weird directions out of Warwick and until we reached Dalby because of the height of the loads and to avoid various low power lines. Our stop the first night out was at Mitchell, where I cooked a steak at the Rest area.

The next morning we cruised on through Tambo and Morven and stopped for a break at Blackall. While we were there I spotted an old Dodge light truck (or it might have been a Fargo) done up a bit like a rat rod and towing a small caravan in camouflage:


Forties pickup. I almost missed getting a shot of this, it was only that he took the side road that I was able to capture it in the distance. Note the big horn on the roof of the cab.

These house-section jobs, I was to learn, take us to some out-of-the-way places and usually end in covering dirt tracks, often with grids…


Approaching grid. There were five or six grids on this track in from the little town of Jericho, each of them varied in height and width, I drove ahead to do some measuring…

…which could have been a problem. One of them I had to take down the side rails while at another it was hopeless and we used the adjacent ‘gate’, a section of the barbed-wire fence which had to be detached and dragged away. Or a real swinging gate.

We had to keep a close eye on it all, of course, damaging the new house section wouldn’t have gone down too well.


Sometimes it was close. Neil keeps an eye on the clearance as he follows the house section in, the driver was taking it real easy.

The foundations were already prepared for the house to be sat in place, a team from the company were turning up the next day to finish it all off. A very slick operation and, apparently, a cost-saver compared to getting a house built on-site from scratch.

I drove across to Emerald, stopping at the lookout on the Drummond Range on the way. I went there in the hope of getting a good sunset photo, but it didn’t work out that way and so I went on.

I would stay in Emerald a couple of nights in the hope of getting a job to take me towards home, but I only got a couple of very local jobs. Still, it would be money in the bank and more experience…

 

I enjoyed every bit of it ! thanks for sharing your experience

 

Now it was mid-Winter, but in the parts of Queensland where I seemed to be so often it wasn’t at all cold. Sleeping in the Territory on the nights I didn’t get a motel room wasn’t uncomfortable, unlike back home in Toowoomba where things got pretty chilly. Driving between the two it was necessary to be prepared to make provision for the climatic differences.

While I was in Emerald doing a few local jobs I saw yet another Valiant in the car park at the Woolworths shopping centre…


VC Valiant. The VC was the first of the Australian Valiants to get a significant restyle away from the US panels, particularly around the rear.

I drove home without a job and had a few days without work, catching up with friends and so on, then I was sent out to Dalby to pilot a strange-looking machine down to a sales yard in Brisbane. As soon as I arrived I thought there would be a problem loading the machine.


Steel on steel. I arrived before the truck did and was concerned that the sheeps-foot wheels wouldn’t get much traction on the steel ramps of the truck.

When the driver got there he also had reservations. And then he had trouble starting up the machine as well. After looking around for all the kill switches and so on he finally got it going and gently walked it on the widened truck.

He gave me the job of telling him exactly how far he had to drive it on to put a certain amount of load on the truck’s bogie by observing this gauge as he moved forward:


Weight gauge. This gauge reads the tonnage on the truck’s wheels and it was my responsibility to advise the driver when he had the machine in the right spot.

But that wasn’t all that was going to delay us getting on the road. We had to measure up the load and quickly found that the height was about 5.5 metres, which raised the threat of snagging the frame on top on an overhead bridge along the way. There was about 400mm to be gained by removing the identification number frame from the roof of the cab.

But the bolts holding it on were too rusty to get undone! The driver knew that one of his workmates was in Dalby and phoned him to see if he had a cordless angle grinder with him, as he did we met up with him at the Caltex roadhouse and the job got done.


Problem areas. Even though those wheels managed to get the machine up the ramps, there was still the risk that they’d slide sideways in transit so plenty of judicious chaining was required. The number frame on the cab roof, which looks simple here, is triangular and proved a real problem to remove.

We were heading for Eagle Farm and the route…



…took us along the Logan Motorway, which had plenty of overhead bridges. Someone said that one was marked at 5.2m clearance, this one is 5.3m, so it’s a good thing we took that trouble.


Low clearance! Even at 5.3 metres this bridge would have done severe damage to the cab had we not taken the time to remove the frame.(GE)

Then I had to rush back home and prepare for a couple of days away, cotton picking machines were on the move and I had a neat little package of three jobs to do. The first was a new machine heading out of the John Deere agent’s in Chinchilla, it was heading to Rolleston…


Special trailer. Completing the first stage of the trio of jobs, the new machine arrives at the farm at Rolleston.

…on a trailer which had been built to fit these machines. Of course, it still needed its hydraulics to widen it to suit:


Widened. Like so many of the floats and trailers, this one had hydraulic rams and linkages which widened it to suit the machines. Unlike the one used for the sheeps-foot machine, this one had the wheel assemblies move out with the chassis.

After the completion of the first stage we all dispersed to get a meal and then headed for the next stage at Baralaba. I got well-separated from the others and finished up unable to find the address. Well, I found the address, but didn’t realise there was a two-mile driveway. I slept on the side of the road before establishing this with a neighbour early in the morning.


Early rising. The strong rays of the rising sun highlight everyone completing the necessary paperwork on the ‘desk’ presented by my Territory’s bonnet at Baralaba.

From there the story gets murky.

We took the machine to Jondaryan and it was unloaded. Another machine was loaded up at the same spot, but the owner didn’t want it to be there overnight. And darkness was near. And we’re not allowed to travel in the dark.

Hurriedly the other pilots and the truck driver, people I normally didn’t work with, made arrangements to take it to a property at Soutbrook. We drove there using back roads in the dark, only emerging onto the highway for the last couple of kilometres.

But there was a further complication. The prime mover was needed on another job and another prime mover had to be arranged. The job was put off for a day and a half and I went home before returning for the final leg to Biniguy. Though it turned out to be Pallamallewa, almost Terry Hie Hie.


Oncoming ten metres. One obstacle faced on the way down the Newell Highway between Goondiwindi and Moree was this oncoming dump truck tipper body.

At this time New South Wales was going through a nasty resurgence of Covid-19 and border passes were necessary to get back into Queensland. These were readily obtained online, but required pass-holders (like me…) to get PCR tests as well.

We readily found the farm where the machine had to go, a prosperous-looking place out on the flat country to the East of Moree…


Merinda Farm. This was a well-kept farm with an efficient crew staffing it, the cotton crop is unseen in the distance.

…and we had plenty of help to unload and this job was over:


Job finished. With all its complications, the job was now over. Even a flat tyre on one of the cotton-picking machines hadn’t stopped us.

I asked the boys at the farm for directions back to the town of Pallamallawa as I wanted to check out some things there. I also had to find out about the Back Pally Road in case I needed to take a shortcut that way some time, the map shows the alternatives:



Heading up that way I quickly found the road was deteriorating after recent rains. The road in had shown a little of this, but not to the same degree as the road I took out:


Muddy way out. It was sometimes a case of keeping it rolling through the puddles, the prospect of getting stuck didn’t appeal to me.

Even so, I ducked back into Moree to see a friend who runs a scrap metal yard. To my surprise I found he had a Territory like mine there and I started making overtures about buying all the mechanical parts as spares for mine. I had no idea how long this would take to bring to fruition.

Heading home I was reminded that you do see all sorts of things…


BMW on bricks. The rear window is smashed, the wheels gone, obviously stolen and dumped on the highway just out of Toowoomba.

…but I was quickly to learn that nothing catches the attention of motorists and truckies to the same extent as the load on my next job.

I was home for just a day and then I was send to Brisbane to pilot a 24ft Caterpillar grader. It was going to Moranbah, so it was a 2-day trip and for the whole two days I was hearing comments on the radio about the size of this thing:


Caterpillar 24’ grader. This machine drew a lot of attention on our 1,068km (664 miles). Here the trailer is decoupled at our overnight stop at Banana.

I was about to head home with no work taking me that way and got a call, I was to wait at Rolleston for a job coming up from the Hunter Valley in NSW. One of the pilots didn’t have a border pass and I’d be substituting. Once I got to Rolleston I had another call, “Go down to meet them, one of the other pilots has to go onto another job!”

I went South to Injune, just past there I could hear them calling each other on the radio and joined them for the balance of the journey. But the day was running out and we camped at Rolleston, all the while concerned about that road job. No permission was forthcoming, it was Friday evening, I had seen that the road was complete apart from the final sealing.

On Saturday morning I drove ahead, moving back the bollards for about half a mile, and we took it through. Another pilot came down to join us before we got to Springsure so we had a complete complement of pilots as we covered the final 150kms to the Kestrel mine just North of Emerald.

After completing this job I went back to Emerald with a bit of time on my hands. I took a little sightseeing drive out to Fairbairn Dam…


Fairbairn Dam. Just outside Emerald, this dam supplies irrigation water and is rarely seen at a high level.

…and spent a night in the motel. The next day I had a number of small jobs to do for the local pilot agent. The first involved yet another grader, but not such a large one:


Two cranes. I’m not sure why the two cranes were in play here, presumably something was locked up and the wheels of the grader couldn’t turn to load it onto the platform.

It didn’t go far and then I headed back into town. Somehow there was a mistake about my next job and I headed off towards Blackwater with an empty platform following me. A phone call asked me where I was and I was sent back up the Gregory Highway to the Lilyvale Road and the Crinum mines.

Eric, driving the truck with the empty platform was furious, but he had to wait for someone else while I performed important duties out there.


Crinum bucket. This bucket from a drag-line has been all sandblasted and painted for its new use.

There was a cast of thousands out there, I was a mere bit player as I waited at the gate for the truck to emerge with the bucket. There was a police escort due to its size, three pilots, cranes for loading and unloading, all to move it 300 metres down the road.

We were to learn the reason soon enough…


Recreation area. This was the destination for the bucket, the cranes were waiting to onload when we got there.

…as it was explained to us:

“It’s a bit of an extravagance,” the man from the mine said, “we’re setting up this recreation area for staff and their families. After this flurry of jobs I headed back home where there was other work to be done. I was keen to get the Dodge gearchange finished, for one thing.

I was also becoming concerned about a noise in the front end and, while it took me longer than it should, I ultimately diagnosed it as a front wheel bearing going. To my surprise, the wheel bearings come as a unit on these cars and I found it was not much more for someone else ‘supply and fit’ than it was for me to just buy the hub and bearing assembly.


Progress. The gearchange starts to come together here, while the hub and bearing assembly of the Territory was smartly changed by the workshop which had repaired my exhaust months earlier.

It had been a tricky operation cutting the threads in the alloy housing, the bolts intended to go in there being only 3/16” UNC. I broke a couple of taps doing the job and decided I had to make studs instead of screwing bolts in there as the studs could be permanent and not prone to damaging the threads. Just a bit more work to do.

And another job was coming my way which would take me away for four days. In view of that I went up to the Baillie Henderson clinic…


Fountain at the Baillie Henderson. I had the time and I might not be at home when my appointment date was up, so I went to see if I could get my Covid booster shot.

… where I’d earlier got my first Covid vaccination. I wasn’t due for my booster shot for another week and a half, but as it was over three weeks since my first they let me have it. This was also necessary as part of the border crossing permit anyway.

As I had a job heading South the following Monday – August 16 – I filled the fuel tank and made sure I was ready to go. I’d be travelling with my good friend Mick:


Mick loads the Moxy. Mick drives the Moxy up onto the trailer, guided by the worker making sure he gets it nice and central.

I was to really get to know Mick on this job, having worked with him before on the job to the Cracow goldmine and now we were going to be working together for two full days. The trip was to Lake Cowal, near West Wyalong, and the plan included doing another job from Wagga back to the same goldmine once we were there.

But not everything works out that smoothly, does it?

 

You move some odd and strange things around. And the town names???? Yeah... Ok...

 

Odd and strange is right...

I think I posted it earlier in the thread, here the truckies have a saying, "Without trucks Australia stops!" And that's dead right, even if we have to prove it by taking up all the road to get some things to their destination.

Back to mid-August, 2021:The Moxy was loaded shortly after I reached BK Civil’s yard just South of Toowoomba. A very pleasant Winter’s day had presented itself and we soon struck out for our distant destination. Lake Cowal is just near West Wyalong and getting to the mine required going to the town and then doubling back around.



Our overnight stop was made at Gilgandra, where we camped in the parking area opposite the Shell Roadhouse…


Overnight stop. The Shell roadhouse just North of Gilgandra is popular with truck drivers with plenty of places to park their trucks.

…and Mick dined at the roadhouse while I set up my stove on the back of his truck and cooked a steak for myself. While we were there another of the pilots who works for Darren was cruising by and he stopped for a chat for a half-hour or so.

The next morning we were away early and left the Newell Highway because of recent rains having damaged the road. We took a road not normally available to wide loads through Narromine. Along the way I was surprised to see how much canola was growing.


Canola in the fog. Early morning fog over the canola on the road to Narromine shows how early we got on the road.


The fog lifts in the sun. On the Eastern side of the road the fog was soon to clear as we travelled along.

I refuelled at Forbes and Mick made a brief stop at one point too, where I took the opportunity to take some more detail photos of the Bell machine:


Articulation. ‘Moxy’ is a generic term applied to this kind of machine, they are articulated with hydraulic rams and these large bearings carrying out the task of steering.

Ultimately we reached Lake Cowal in the early afternoon, I then headed towards Wagga Wagga for the second part of this job. Mick unloaded and did the same as we were to go to there to get another machine and take it back to the same mine.

Going into Barmedman I couldn’t help but get a shot of this promotion for their tractor pull…


Rugged machine. There’s not a lot that’s real about this dummy ‘tractor’, but it serves the purpose of advertising the event.

…but when I got to Wagga it all turned sour. I had a bit of trouble with revised roads in the area, but when I caught up with Mick he had just learned that the machine he’d come to take back to Lake Cowal had already been taken there!

It was time for me to revise my immediate plans…



This map shows the revised path, first to Wagga Wagga, then to Harden where I did a little visiting, across to Forbes, where I had a PCR test I would need to get me back into Queensland, and then I was back on the Newell Highway. I camped just out of Parkes that night, then drove through to Narrabri before again breaking with the Newell to go a different way.


Canola at Narrabri. I’ve never seen canola growing this far North before, this paddock being on my left just after I turned off the Newell to head over Mount Kaputar towards Bingara.

So this was my revised path home:



I was heading via a Phil’s place in Ashford, where I spent the night. This meant I’d be crossing the border – and having to show my border pass – at Texas. I’d heard of someone else having trouble here as they were quizzed on why they’d crossed into NSW at Goondiwindi and were later returning via Texas, but I go no such static.

Barely home again, I got an urgent call to help out where another pilot had struck trouble. They’d lost a wheel of their Toyota and I was to take over from Dalby until the repaired vehicle was able to catch up.


Passing room. An oncoming bulldozer squeezes by on the Leichhardt Highway, our load is a control room for a mine, full of electronic gizmos.

The offending wheel had been replaced and the other driver caught up to us at Westwood, where it was necessary for us to stop for a while to fit in with the police escort which was needed for the short distance up the twisty hill towards Duaringa.


Careful measuring. When there’s a police escort the officer(s) involved have to check all the measurements we record with the load in our own books. Here he’s retracting his special height measuring device after our arrival at the dusty truck parking area at Westwood.

I left the crew there at about 4:30pm and started on my way home, but I decided to take it easy and got a motel room at Taroom on the way. As a result of this I was driving through Chinchilla on the Saturday morning and spotted a sign for a car show at the primary school.

I reckoned it was worth the deviation, after all, I wasn’t booked for another job until the next morning.


Small Morrises. A Morris Minor 1000 from the late fifties and a Morris 8/40 utility from the late forties sit side by side.

The Minor 1000 had the 948cc overhead valve engine, but earlier Minors – up to 1952 – had the 8/40’s side valve 903cc powerhouse, while there was an 803cc overhead valve model in between. I would reckon that this one started out with that, judging by the grille:


Hot-rodded. There were many ‘modernised’ features to this Minor, a well and truly modified Toyota Corolla 1200 engine was obvious while disc brakes hit behind the alloy wheels. I’m willing to bet that the rear end was also Japanese.

Some Mopar representation was evident, too…


Uncommon sights. This ’63 Dodge D100 is a fairly recent import and remains left hand drive while the VE Valiant behind it only has some imported bits.

…both Australian and American. The Valiant represented both kinds:


Best of both worlds. Right hand drive and Australian built for the most part, the Valiant has Dart GT appendages from the US grafted on. It sported a V8 engine, if original this would have been a 318. There’s a Corvette alongside.

And this was an Australian assembly with a few minor modifications:


Dodge Phoenix – Australian style. Another 318 engine, this time a Poly, was standard in this Phoenix. Really a rebadged Plymouth from 1965. It’s flanked by a Mustang and an MG TF.

There was, as always, a few of true Vintage models. The classification ‘Vintage’ is reserved here for cars made before 1931, though not including cars which are classified ‘Edwardian’ (pre-1905) or ‘Veteran’ (1905 to 1918) and it’s always good to see them out and about.


1928 Rugby. A model from the Durant Motor Co, the Rugby was the same as the Star sold in the USA. An early T-model sits alongside.

The renaming of the Star as the Rugby was necessary because of a conflict in Commonwealth countries with another make sold under the Star name.

It wasn’t a bad little show, I hope the school raised some handy cash from it and I’d imagine it’s a regular thing as I judge the situation from the outside. A very good roll-up from across many spheres of interest, and there was – naturally enough in a rural area – some farming machinery too:


Old machines too. These old tractors, one with steam power and steel wheels and the other with solid rubber tyres, show signs that they’re still well cared-for and get put to use at times.

It wasn’t far home from here, I noted Sandra’s absence when I got there and at one stage I drove out to get something to eat. This sight made me wonder about those who loaded it:


Unbalanced load. The car is a Mitsubishi I380, the last model manufactured in Australia, and the way the ute is loaded so far forward on the trailer it’s a wonder the front wheel drive car has any traction.

I also wondered whether or not the damage to the front of it was done as a result of the lack of braking efficiency while so loaded.

That night, as I was preparing for an early start the next morning (Sunday) I received a phone call from Sandra. She was in hospital and asked me to cover up the budgerigar’s cage for the night. I asked how she was and she said she was ‘coping’ and that her daughter would be with her the next day.

That early start was another house section from Westbuilt at Warwick:


Early start. Street light still on, we strike out along the highway out of Warwick. These house sections, because of their height, are required to take a fairly tortuous path on the way to Dalby to avoid low-hanging power lines.

We camped that night at Rolleston, I parked up alongside the Rest Area on the North side of town, which has good amenities, the truck driver camped at a truck parking area about half a kilometre away. We would be away early again in the morning.

We didn’t have far to go, but all eyes were on having plenty of time to get home the same day, a bigger job for the truck driver – having come up from Lismore – than it was for me.


Low over the grid. As it was a very long house section, the trailer was well-extended and clearance over this cattle grid on the road out from Springsure was non-existant.

After we covered the 30kms out from Springsure, many of them dusty as in this picture, we headed up a steep hill to the house site. It was going to be a big house, this was the fourth section to arrive on site:


All four sections. Up on the top of the hill things were being readied for the completion of the home, and with four sections it was to be larger than normal.

I was quite surprised to see the tremendous 360° views that were there from the house site, a perfect choice of somewhere to live. Unfortunately the sun was a bit too low for me to get a good shot of it.


House site prepared. With all four sections there, and the tractor in place to move them into place, within a day the team would have those sections sitting in place on these foundations and ready to complete.

So I headed home on Sunday afternoon. I’d had another message from Sandra, “Opp today,” was all that it said, she was getting some stents put in. But by Monday there were complications and she was sent to Brisbane with bleeding into her stomach.

With her away, I realised her mother would be missing out on visits from her. Sandra had completed a bit over a year looking after her mother and then put her into a nursing home. She was by now 93 and I decided to take her dog with me and pay her a visit. To avoid her getting concerned I told her Sandra was in Brisbane, but I didn’t mention hospitals.

I was not to learn that Sandra had a pacemaker fitted for over a year…

 

You have gone through all of this! It's really unbelievable !

 

All this and more, zahar...


I still had no real idea what was going on with Sandra. But I knew that her daughter would take care of things relating to her and so she’d be well-supported if I was away working. I took her mother’s dog up to the nursing home to visit her, which the poor old lady appreciated, and spent time packing some things for despatch to Max Stahl and Bob Britton.

The next two days in a row I was ‘on duty’ for deliveries of large silos out to Talwood, West of Goondiwindi. It was a strange place, there was nothing to be seen of farming activity, but the young property owner had laid a huge concrete pad of a size which would allow installation of six of these silos.

For my part, I was getting lots of pics of the workings of things so I could sent prints to Bob Britton, the hydraulics and the truck’s setup to carry the silos was a part of this…


Supported. The two heavy arms lock into the base ring of the silo to load, transport and unload, hydraulics do all the work.

…and I got this shot of the first of them being stood up ready for installation:


Structural integrity. Lifting the silo relies on the strength of the lower tubular frame and the sheet steel shell.

Two of the pilots on each of these trips are paid for their time to erect the ladders up the side and secure the silos in place. I often just hang around to watch as in time I’ll need to know what has to be done.


Pipe rollers. Short lengths of pipe are used as rollers to enable exact locating of the silos where they’re needed.

When the job was completed on the second day the young farmer’s silo array was definitely looking like it was making progress.


Second silo erected. The extent of the ladders and handrails can be seen in this shot showing both silos in place.

Back home for a work-free Friday, I managed to post away the parcels to Max and Bob and get my gear together for a trip to the laundromat. Some jobs at home on the Saturday – as well as the time at the laundromat – saw me ready to head out on Sunday morning for a trip to my shed. I had some things to pick up and I wanted to give the Territory an oil change.

On the way I spotted one of my pet hates…


Stretched Hummer. Just why anyone would want to create such a monster is beyond me, why someone would use it for their wedding is different step altogether.

…just leaving the service station around the corner from home. Six wheels yet!

Another surprise as I went through Warwick, where I stopped to get some lunch, was to see the once-grand name of MG attached to a McDonalds delivery vehicle:


McDonalds MG. Not only did it seem a considerable fall from grace for the car, the lady driving seemed to be more of a customer than an employee if one judged by her weight.

It was Tuesday before I had another job, but it was an ‘away’ start so I had to get out towards Theodore (about 400kms from home) and sleep somewhere out that way to be ready for the early start on Tuesday morning. It was a John Deere header being sent back to Toowoomba:


Header from Lonesome Creek. Once I found this rig on a farm out of Theodore all was well. This pic shows it pulled up for breakfast at Chinchilla after three hours on the road.

During this period we saw our good friend, Bob Britton, excited that his neighbour’s son was taking an interest in things at Bob’s place. Bob had been looking for someone to take over some of the tidying up around the yard and the teenager took on the job, but at the same time he offered to help Bob keep his ‘museum’ of cars mobile.

He was to prove quite a whiz at getting them running, his reward being that he could drive them around the yard and sometimes take a dash down the street. It was to be, however, a short-lived bit of excitement.

Meantime I took on another Ahrens silo job, this time to somewhere I’d never been, Surat.



As often happens, we had a slow start as the truck wasn’t ready to go, but in time we were jostling along the back-roads past Dalby and out past Tara. Somewhere along there I recall watching as one of the truck’s rear wheels ran over the flattened-and-dried-out body of a cat, flicking it out of the dust into the air momentarily.

The fixing of the silos onto the truck I’ve previously shown in partial detail, that being the lower end. At the top end there’s a support which holds on to the circular frame of the filling hatch:


Top support. While the lower end of the silos is held by the heavy beams which lift it hydraulically, the top is located by this simple triangulated frame.

I didn’t hang around this time as the boys assembled things, driving back into Surat for a bit of a look around…


Cobb & Co. Nothing speaks of early settlement more than this name, a stage coach company which was started by an American and spread throughout the Eastern part of Australia.

…at this very old town and its buildings which told of past glories.


Surat Shire Hall. The hall is huge and would have been the setting for regular dances and public meetings a hundred years ago.

On the way out there I’d seen an inviting sign for a car museum. This was at Glenmorgan and it was another reason I wanted to head back early. I hunted around the town and found nothing that was actually stated to be a museum, but there was this motley collection of (mostly ’50s) cars:


Unimpressive. If this was a museum it’s easy to see why it’s not now, the cars are hardly worth taking the trouble to have a look at them. The only thing worth mentioning is the one on the right, a ’58 or ’59 Morris Marshall unique to Australia.

They were alongside this building:


Monty’s Garage. Probably more interesting, but definitely all shut up, the old-style fuel bowsers hark back to the thirties, forties and fifties.

The next day I was off to McAlister, just out of Toowoomba, for a job to Talwood. This one was a bit different, an auger that swayed around in the breeze as it was being hauled along.


Large auger. Large crops were being harvested this season and farmers were upgrading equipment as they could. Hence this auger was eagerly awaited out by the Weir River.

Unloading it took a bit of juggling, it had to be lifted off the truck and there was no crane present to do the job.


Co-operation. With a machine lifting each side of the auger, the truck was able to drive out and leave them to lower it to the ground.

On the way home I was surprised to see this number plate:


Reily? My stepson Reilly had a Ford Ranger something like this one so it was unusual to see this name on the plate of one near home.

Friday that week was a quiet day, I spent time cleaning the leaves out of the pool, giving my bad knee a hard time as I did so, and then in the afternoon I had a bad dose of vertigo. Or something. So bad that it lasted for hours, something that hadn’t happened to me for several years, and I had no medicine to fix it. I went without dinner and did nothing all night.

I kept working on Dodge project bits over the weekend and at the Men’s Shed on Monday, September 6, 2021, and I screwcut some threads on some bolts for the gearchange. To finish those threads I went to the local hardware store and bought some die nuts:


Die nut botch-up. The packet says they’re Imperial on the front, Metric on the back. The metric thread size would be close to UNF, but they were in fact UNC.

You wouldn’t expect this sort of thing from a cheap product, but P & N is one of our leading brands of such tooling!

I sent off an e.mail to the company and I’m still waiting for a reply.

Another house section job out of Warwick was my next job and this one was going to Alpha, West of Emerald. The first day we got as far as Banana…


Heading North. Out in front of the house section, I got this shot of the clear road as we travelled North out of Miles towards Theodore and Banana.





Breaking camp. We’re ready to get rolling as the sun starts to get high in the sky here, and there are adventures ahead of us this day.

…and the next morning I refuelled at Bluff. Driving along towards Blackwater we got advice that there was some roadworks going on there, but of more immediate importance was the sight of a Franna crane bouncing along the roadway in front of us. These things are an absolute danger to everyone with their tyres being the only suspension and they are limited to 80kmh.

I called the driver up on the UHF and asked, “How far are you going?” His response was that he was going to Tambo!


A Franna crane. They steer by bending in the middle, they have no suspension and bounce all over the road, dangerous and uncomfortable things.

Tambo? That was a long way away and he’d obviously just come from Rockhampton, all up he was on a 600+km journey with this thing bouncing his kidneys to death on roads which were going to get worse than the ones on which this thing was jarring up and down now.

Expressing our dismay at his ill-fortune, he responded simply, “Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to it all week!” Nevertheless, he made room for us to get by and we headed on our way.


Tight squeeze. A diversion caused by a low railway bridge sent us on this track beside the creek at Alpha. The corners were nearly too tight for our long load.

The truck driver had made this trip before and knew it was tight where we had to divert under the railway line alongside the creek, he took it very carefully and just made it without scraping the trees.


Foundations ready. On the site the foundations were in readiness to receive the new home. The young man putting it all together had married the daughter of the property owner and was managing the business.

There was an older house nearby…


Older house. Not suited to use these days, it must have served for many years as a residence on the property.

…which led me to look around the place a bit (with the young man’s permission) and I found this old Studebaker nearby too:


Studebaker. Probably about a 1930 model, this Studebaker no doubt once worked hard helping keep the farm running.

I’d been in touch with Ron McNamara during the course of this trip and he had a job arranged for me to take me towards home. It was from Isaac Plains, so that night I took it easy in a motel room in Emerald.

Spring was here (officially from September 1) and things were warming up a little, to have a job back was a nice bonus and I didn’t mind having to run up through Clermont to get to the start of it the next day.

Though there were to be a couple of down-sides to it…