This one went out last night, headed for North Queensland. A shipping container sitting on the lead trailer, and a plant module chained down on the one behind it.
Two completely different bits of freight, one road train, one driver, one trip. That is worth pulling apart, because it is the part of a quote most people never see.
Different freight, same set of trailers
A container and a plant module have almost nothing in common once you are loading them. A container is a known quantity. It is a standard size, it has castings on the corners built for exactly this, and it sits down and locks in.
A plant module is the opposite. It is a one-off. The weight sits somewhere odd, the lifting points are wherever the fabricator put them, and it usually needs its own arrangement of chains and dunnage worked out on the spot.
Put them on the same road train and the job is making the whole combination legal and stable as one unit, not two separate loads that happen to be travelling together. Height, weight distribution and restraint all get worked out across the set.
Why you want your freight sharing a truck
Running a road train configuration means more than one trailer behind the truck. If your load only fills one of them, the sensible thing is for something else to fill the rest.
The alternative is a truck heading across the country with half its capacity doing nothing, and that space still has to be paid for by somebody. Usually it is the one customer on board.
So when your freight can share a set with other freight going the same way, the rate reflects it. This is the single biggest lever on interstate pricing and it is almost entirely about timing. If you have a few days of movement in your dates, you are far more likely to line up with a set already going that way.
North Queensland is a long way from Perth
It is one of the longest freight runs in the country. That distance is exactly why the loading matters. A load that is merely adequate will not survive several thousand kilometres of highway, corrugations and heat without something working loose.
It is also why we run one driver per truck rather than handing the load over halfway. Nobody re-checks a restraint they did not do themselves as carefully as the bloke who chained it down in the first place.
If your freight has a date to hit at the far end, a connection, a shutdown, a crane booked, tell us the date when you ring rather than the pickup day. The run gets planned backwards from the delivery.
Got a container, a machine, or something awkward that needs to go interstate? Give Spanner a call on 0429 807 308 for a quote.