Truck Driving in Australia - Road-Trains And Their Complex Rules

looking at the way of life in Australia one might wonder about the many peculiarities of the people down under because it's very similar in size to the United States of America you think there would be many similarities with the land of the free but the deeper you delve the more you realize how different the two are and especially when it comes to the trucking industry there's regulations for everything the number of hours you can drive truck length maximum payload and much more with a population of up to 24 million a number that's much less significant than the 333 million people living in the U.S the fact that most of this population resides in the east of the nation means that there is a need for regulations on the freight that moves through the east coast of the nation considering the fact that the nation relies on this to move its goods around there are a plethora of rules that the country applies to highways down under so in today's video we'll look at truck driving rules in Australia and what it's like to be a truck driver there and and trust me it's very different from the US and Europe in fact it's bound to blow your minds a large majority of Australia's Freight runs through the south from the city of Melbourne through to Brisbane in the Southeast and Sydney to the South there are a handful of cities in between though which makes the freight routes in Australia quite diverse so depending on the city that you wish to take your Freight to the route may change accordingly and these varied routes call for the need to use different types of trucks depending on how the terrain is these types range from small to medium-sized and large trucks depending on what they're delivering heavier goods are delivered in long-nosed trucks that can travel very long distances within the highways due to their stronger power engines and torque on the other hand the lighter Freight is transported in cab over trucks perfectly designed for the cities as they are a lot easier to maneuver in the smaller city streets conventional trucks that take large amounts of goods across the country are called road trains they are made of a minimum of 344 foot trailers hauling a 120 ton load across the flat highways of the Australian Outback these road trains can also have up to six trailers in total with all that said let's go down to some regulations these trucks and the truck drivers face no driver can haul goods for more than 12 hours in a day in total even in shorter stretches with 30 minute intervals being taken every four hours however ask any Truckee and they'd tell you that that's a bunch of jargon as they've never really followed these rules despite having a log book for their activities a logbook called The Book of Lies go figure but of course there has to be some reason for these limitations in place and the first of those is that the temperature goes as high as 48 degrees Celsius in the dry Australian Outback but the rain can also fall as hard here as it can anywhere in the world this makes it important to maintain high value tires that can withstand rugged roads this also requires the truckies to carry a large number of supplies such as food water and fuel in the event that anything unexpected occurred during this trip they also need to have what is known as a bull bar in front of these road trains as animals as large as kangaroos wander onto the roads and these accidents can sometimes be more harmful to the driver than these nearly 200 pound animals you wouldn't believe how many truck accidents that happened in Australia because of kangaroos Crossing roads considering these things to look out for there are still quite a handful of rules that the truckies are subject to once they hit the highways for example while we mentioned that trailers are often around 44 feet in length they can be as long as 53 feet but no more than that and while most of them are supported by tri-axle combinations trucks with Quad Axle combinations aren't that uncommon either the length laws also made a large number of truckies drive trucks with single units or stock cartridge to wiggle their way out of them now you might think these are just way too many rules and no one follows them but there are some pretty heavy punishments when truckies or their employees disobey some of these strict rules both the employees and their employee truckies could be held responsible by law if the truckies are found driving overloaded or overweight trucks or were caught over speeding on the highways yikes so as you might have caught on there's a mountain of rules of conduct driving that truckers in Australia need to follow mostly determined by the long distances some of these drivers have to cover most of them focused on the efficiency that the country relies on and although the drivers faced some problems this law may be in the best interest of everyone involved in the thankless active Trucking but needless to say it's a quite different approach to trucking than in most parts of the world well that's a wrap for this video let us know your thoughts in the comments below be sure to subscribe and hit the Bell icon to never miss any of our future updates till then goodbye foreign [Music]

Channel: Go Truck Yourself

Views: 24,693

Keywords: road train, trucking, truckers, trucks, extreme driving, highway, fire engine, truck stop, road trains australia, Truck, Australia, Road-Trains, road train adventures, triple road train, outback truckers, ozoutback, western australia, outback australia, extreme machines, world's longest truck, powerful truck, biggest truck, driving across australia, quad road train, Australian Road-Train 2023

Id: XoILDwqxnH0

Length: 5min 2sec (302 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023