Sunday, Jul 15, 2012 at 00:21
I've owned a 100 tonne Drake low loader for several years, piloted thousands of wide loads and hauled oversize earthmoving equipment for over 30 yrs. It's a waste of time trying to contact anyone coming towards you, as you often have little time to make contact.
I was running a 3.6M load West of
Kimba and came around a bend to find a wide load that was 5M wide coming towards me, only 250M away, and
the pilot only 50 metres in front of the truck. It was fortunate we had plenty of road width at that point.
Many truckies are in too much of a hurry, and won't wait for wide loads even. I was piloting my 100 tonner float from
Brisbane to Kalgoorlie at 4.2M wide when we came to a
bridge on the Barrier Hwy, well west of
Broken Hill - and an East-Wester was barrelling towards us.
I asked him to back off, and he refused. He passed my float right on the
bridge and forced my driver into the
bridge kerbing, damaging two rims on the dolly in the process. Too many truckies are just plain dangerous operators with a "pedal to the metal" mentality.
As far as wide loads go, get used to them, in the North of W.A. There's over 200 wide load permits being issued a month, by the MRD of W.A. - and that's double what it has been, and it's going to increase by even more again.
The Chevron Wheatstone gas project at
Onslow alone, is going to have 700 road train movements from
Perth a week, over the next 18 mths. That's above the other, already-increased road train traffic. Wheatstone is one of Australias largest current projects, at about $50B from memory.
Here's a couple we ran into South of
Karratha on 3rd July, they were heading South and we were travelling North.
Both
the pilot and the Police escort forced us right off the road, because these loads were around 7.5M or 8M wide.
These platform floats contained 184 wheels each, and each wheel is loaded up to 2 or 2.5 tonnes, so these two wide loads travelling in convoy would have been grossing around 400 tonnes each.
AnswerID:
490979