Road trains

Tuesday 26^th July

Roebuck Plains Roadhouse, where we are camped, is right at the junction where the main coastal road from Perth to Darwin meets the side road out to Broome. As such it is a vital stopover for traffic heading in either direction, especially Road Trains.  The Roadhouse is ideally set up to cater for these giants of the road with a huge turning and parking bay at the rear and loads of space by the diesel bowsers.

During the day there is an almost continual stream of these giants pulling in to refuel both truck and driver, and Cameron has a ball going over to photograph the trucks and chat with the drivers.  Occasionally he gets invited to sit in the cabs, and undoubtedly the highlight for him so far was to sit in the cab of a Kenworth pulling 4 trailers loaded with cattle.

On this particular occasion we were both there with him, and we got talking to the driver. He told us he was carrying 155 head of cattle, half of them scrub bulls.  These are bulls that have grown up in the wild, and are only able to be mustered by helicopter.  Up until this time they have had absolutely no contact with humans, and by the time they are eventually mustered into cattle yards, they are understandably quite irritable.

They are loaded onto the trucks with the aid of long handled cattle prodders, operated from outside the rails.  If you got into the pen they would kill you. The rails of the cattle yards have to be made from railway lines or a similar material, as these bulls charge on sight, regardless of what is between you and them, and wooden rails have proven to be not strong enough to hold them.  

He said the bulls averaged between 750 and 800 kilos and where either Brahman or Brahman/Hereford cross.  We climbed up onto one of his trailers, and he showed us two of the bulls who were just short of 2 meters tall at the shoulder.  He estimated that all up, his gross weight was over 100 tonnes, and his Road Train was 53.5 meters long.  That’s one heck of a lot of truck to have belting along the road at about 100kph.

He was originally from Invercargill, but had been over here in Australia for 18 years, and had spent all that time driving Road Trains.  The season for carting the cattle runs from March to October, and when he first started 18 years ago, he was earning between 80 and 90 thousand dollars for the 8 months work.  What he is getting now he didn’t actually say, but we would imagine it’s probably close to twice that.  Not bad for 8 months work.

He told us that for about every 7 cattle road train drivers, 6 of them would be kiwis who come over here each year, earn the big bucks, then go home for the summer.  Not a bad lifestyle.  Mind you they put in long hours.  Our driver had to get his load to Perth, over 2200 km away, by the following night.  He told us he would be driving 17 hours today with a half hour break every 5 hours, and then 14 hours tomorrow.  That didn’t leave a lot of time for a bit of sleep as well!!  Truck driving is now high on Cameron’s list of what he’s going to do when he gets older.  Can’t say I blame him.