Experience of operating a 50 metre megatruck in Australia

Australia’s road trains, which typically consist of three trailers in a row, have been in use since the 1930s, when they started to replace camel caravans, which had previously been used to move products across the desert. Massive tyres, each valued at much to A$100,000 (RM3 million), are put onto Zacharias’ road train. The tyres weigh about five tonnes. For example, dumpers carrying iron ore that Australia sends to China or Japan employ them. The load is placed onto the truck in Wubin, a West Coast town north of Perth, in an area known as the “Road Train Assembly Area,” and then Zacharias drives it 1,600 km north to Port Hedland. Large cities prohibit the use of road trains. Zacharias’ truck is 53.5 metres long, which is the maximum length allowed in Australia. In contrast, the longest possible vehicle in his native Germany is 25.25 metres. Every month, Zacharias travels around 22,000 km to buy new tyres after unloading his cargo at Port Hedland. A tour, in essence, never ends, he explains. The driver occasionally puts in eighty-hour work weeks and drives for seventeen hours a day. It’s a lonely life of long days and exhaustion. Zacharias sleeps in his vehicle as well. He claims he doesn’t see his wife too often. “I don’t have a private life when I’m working,” he admits, but that suits him personally. After a tour, he always returns home and within a few days is itching to hit the road again. It like an addiction virtually. You don’t know anything else if you put in so many long hours at work.”Zacharias is from a family of heavy vehicle operators. His brother and father are also licenced drivers. Zacharias’s brother was undergoing driving instruction when he was ten years old.

Zacharias remembers, “He had a lorry calendar on the wall, and one month showed road trains.” The small child’s fascination with the enormous cars speeding towards the horizon on deserted highways sparked a desire in him to drive one of them someday. But it would be a long time before his boyhood ambition came true. Before obtaining his truck licence at the age of 23, he began training as a mariner for inland boats. Before long, he was transporting goods throughout Europe, reaching all the way from Portugal and Spain to Italy and Tunisia. He travelled to Australia for the first time in 2002. He never left, falling deeply in love with both the area and a lady. However, Zacharias would still need to endure a few more years and a trying breakup before he could eventually operate a road train. He claims that stereotypes about the trucking industry contributed to his hesitation to start driving again. “Especially in Germany, driving a lorry doesn’t have the best reputation in society,” according to him. For a considerable amount of time, he was too shy to admit that he was a truck driver, even though he had liked the job while he was living in Germany. He did, however, think at the time, “Now I’ll do what I want to do and not what others are expecting of me,” which encouraged him to take the jump after he successfully went through the traumatic separation with his fiancée. And driving trucks has always been that for him. Zacharias was given a minor autism diagnosis a few years ago, which also helps to explain why he prefers to be alone himself. He acknowledges, “People are not my thing.” “I don’t like to be alone all the time, but I need my own time to myself.” He scarcely notices home when he’s travelling. He remarks, “As far as truck driving goes, I’m glad I don’t have to drive in Germany anymore,” because there is a lot more traffic there and manoeuvring a lorry frequently calls for steely nerves. He’s made the ideal home in Australia, where he spends his days traversing a huge swath of territory on his road train. “Nature, freedom – that’s what I personally like so much.”