Climb aboard a road train and get a glimpse of what it's like to drive this monstrous beast! Meet Marvin, a road train driver and hear about what he does. We'll go into the cab for a driver's-eye view.
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The aptly named road trains can be seen all over
the highways of Australia, beyond the main urban
centers. They're a common sight in the outback.
They haul just about everything from food to fuel,
from livestock to mining equipment.
Their excessive length is why they're called trains.
Some road trains are 60 meters long,
more than half the length of an American football field.
They plow through kangaroos and emus,
and I even heard a story of one road train blasting
through a herd of camels crossing the road,
leaving in its wake a trail of camel parts.
It's hard to stop a moving vehicle that's traveling
at 100 kilometers per hour and weighs
over 100 tons. I was told some haul 140 tons,
and in some cases they are capable of pulling
160 tons of freight. You'd better get out of the way.
These massive transport vehicles
keep the goods moving and keep the country's economy rolling along.
You might notice that
they are equipped with giant bull bars
in the front for minimizing damage to the trucks
when collisions with animals, sometimes even buffaloes,
weighing close to 850 kilos or
some 2,000 pounds, occur.
While at Mundrabilla Roadhouse,
I met a friendly road train driver named Marvin, who agreed
to let me climb aboard for a minute and film from the cab.
This is Marvin inside a road train right now,
and he's the road train driver.
We're at the roadhouse.
So he's just doing a little quick drive around for me here.
You pull a lot of
Cargo, don't you? Yeah
Every single week pretty much
Yeah
Yeah, we're gonna just hook these trains up
Marvin's just checking what's going on here.
It's quite a big road train as you can see
Connected.
Okay, things good
and Marvin he's
from India,
but he's
driven trucks
in the States
And
Canada
Canada gets pretty cold
That's Marvin taking off with his road train there
Marvin was off on his way again heading for points east
a thousand more kilometers down the road
I met up with another road train driver
who allowed me to climb up into the cab so I could show you the inside
We're going to go up
into the road
train train here
in Australia.
and just once a week we roll up and down this line.
I'll show you what it looks like.
All right, so you've got some
instrumentation up here.
Here's the dashboard.
And it's, yeah, it's quite a big vehicle.
See overhead.
And it does a lot of mileage, I can tell you that.
And this is your view as you're going down the highway.
So, there you go.
Okay, I think they're going to switch road trains here.
I'm going to unhook from the first one
and hook onto the second.
He's going
to take it.
This guy over here,
he's going to take it in over and hook onto that road train there
and carry it on to the next destination.
So there he goes.
He's going to back in and connect with that next road train.
He'll be the next leg of the road train.
Easy peasy.
There you go.
And he's ready to roll.
he just goes ahead
and connects everything all the electrical hoses whatever
