Caravan convoys

Steve,
That is not unusual and truckies do it too. Returning from Adelaide a while back I caught up with a truck on a straight stretch. Went to overtake and found two semi's, then 7, B doubles nose to tail with less than a caravan length between any of them. YES, 9 interstate vehicles all in a row. all driven by professional drivers, 9 must be the magic number.

Yep, as a former rally coordinator for our club, our members were under strict instructions to maintain a 500 metre gap whilst on the highway.

If we had more than 4 or 5 vans we'd split into groups and depart 20 minutes apart heading to the next destination.

.
Steve, I'm afraid that some people take the view that "I'm not breaking any road rules so I'll drive as I like".
Alas, that is part of 'living in a society'.

Not many people know theserules, from Qld Dept of Transport website today, direct copy and paste:
Rules for heavy vehicles
There are some general road rules in Queensland affecting the use of heavy and long vehicles. These include rules for:

safe following distances
stopping
parking
load limits
using low gears.
Heavy vehicles weigh 4.5t or more and long vehicles measure 7.5m or more.

Safe following distances
When driving a vehicle that is 7.5m or longer and following another long vehicle, you must leave a gap of at least 60m between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of you.

If you are driving a road train, you must leave a gap of at least 200m.

Unfortunately appears to be the rule on the Stuart Hwy rather than the exception. I've only done the drive to and from Alice once, but I would have encountered several of these conglomerations in both directions. I'm happy to sit back a km or two and dawdle along at 80 or so until it's time to take a break, but when the speed drops below 80 it's painful. When I lived in the top end, the rule of thumb was to do at least 110 kph to avoid being overtaken by a road train. (What's worse than trying to overtake a road train ...) In 2019 I thought that the same thing would apply, but it seemed that the road trains mostly travelled at night, presumably to avoid the caravans. More scary were the crazy overtaking manoeuvres by caravan towing drivers. At least three times I had to brake and be ready to go bush, fortunately you can see the situation developing on the straight roads and braking usually allows the situation to resolve. I learnt to drive travelling on the many narrow roads in FNQ, so have developed a habit of always looking for a way out if the road ahead looks a bit iffy.

We must have been fortunate - in 10 months wandering around we found Australian drivers hauling caravans and truck drivers to be sensible and considerate in terms of maintaining distances. Perhaps things have deteriorated. Thinking of the importance of this, I remember many years ago in Europe a series of massive accidents in which a major factor was drivers' following too close and without thinking - there were accidents involving as many as 200 vehicles in one crash!

Quite a few truck drivers travel in “close convoy” as a fuel saving method, taking turns at leading. Not saying it is legal, or even acceptable, just putting it out there as a reason.

Macca.

When our caravan club runs roving rallies here in Western Australia, we leave in groups of 5 and travel at around 100 metres apart.
Point vehicle and tail end Charlie alternate between channel 18 and 40 .
Tail end Charlie will talk the truck through on channel 40 while the point vehicle alerts the other 3 vans on 18. Works for us. I do understand though, many caravanners won't stay on the truckle channel as the language is a bit strong.
I imagine there are plenty of caravanners out and about this year with overseas trips canned.
We're staying home. Saving up for a new caravan.