Somewhere in Sweden can be found a couple a road trains which can be compared to some of the outfits on the roads of Australia, and for our operators and engineers this could be an interesting multi-combination truck concept.
It’s difficult to know just what name to call the combinations hauled as they are something which we have never seen here in Australia. The nearest combination would be an AB-triple, which would max out at 107.5 tonnes at HML.
This truck is running at 98 tonnes GCM (9.5 tonnes less than our AB-triple) on two fewer axles with an overall length of 34 metres. This is the kind of innovative design which may give some of our more innovative operators or some of the engineers working in the PBS space food for thought.
The lifting axles tell us this truck must run loaded one way and empty on the return. It runs as an 8×4 prime mover with a bulk body. The prime mover has a lifting (and steering?) tag as the rear axle. Behind this is a tandem axle dolly to pull, what is basically, a B double at the rear. the two triaxle groups on the B-double have lifting axles, so that, when empty, each tri only has the middle axle bearing the weight.
Although I haven’t had experience with this particular combination, I have had experience driving in Sweden, with the large rigid at the front, pulling a semi trailer with a tandem dolly running at 25 metres long and found them quite good to manoeuvre, even in an urban environment.
Here in Australia multi combination regulations have included a stipulation that there should be no load carrying component on the prime mover. This stipulation is historical, but also may be informed by the fact that up until 20 years ago, the maximum mass on a steer axle was six tonnes whereas this particular Scania could well have a steering axle rated up to 10 tonnes.
The second video shows a program testing the performance of a similar combination, to see exactly how these combinations perform in the wild. It’s clearly a state of the art braking system, and the 90 tonnes braking is impressive.
The combinations in question are a Scania R770 V8 running at a length of 34 metres and a GCM of 98 tonnes on 12 axles. The other is a truck going through its paces at the Volvo Hällered test facility. This combination is 30 metres long and with a GCM of 90 tonnes.
