Road Trains

Before coming out to Australia, I was talking with my Aunt Dacia about what I knew (or assumed) about the station. Over the course of the conversation she asked how one moves the product of 50,000 cows from the land to market. Unlike America, Australia is not a country whose development was heavily shaped by trains, so how then does one transport that volume of animals? The answer – road trains.

A road train is an 18 wheeler on steroids. More accurately, it is a 62 wheeler. One truck pulls 3 trailers at once. Given the remote nature of life in the Territory and the huge distances between population centers, road trains are the dominant means of transporting goods. On the road you will pass trains with 3 tankers full of petrol, some of standard box cars, and sometimes combinations – a truck pulling a freezer car, a box trailer, and a flatbed, for instance. Livestock is transported in double-decker trailers – 3 cars each with 2 levels of cattle. It’s a LOT of cows.

Walhallow, like almost every station, owns its own road train, which we use to move cattle around the property (usually to bring weaners back to the house yards from a paddock yard). When we sell cattle we use a trucking company like Currlie’s or RTA (Road Trains of Australia) to haul them for us. Our cattle end up in several different places depending on their fate. Older culled cows go straight to the abattoir (slaughter house) in Townsville, all the way toward the coast in the east. Young steers are sent to a fattening station in Davenport, also in Queensland, where they grow a while longer before moving to the feed lot. Last week we filled an order for over 1500 culled heifers to go to the Philippines, where they will live in a feed lot eating pineapple pulp. We loaded 9 road trains that went to Darwin where the cattle would be moved onto a boat and shipped overseas. What a strange life for a cow!

Our road train is a giant black and red serpent of a vehicle with a matching white and red cab named the Georgina Drover. On trucking mornings Cameron sets out early since the truck has to drive fairly slowly over the dirt roads. You can see it for miles by the plume of red dust it throws up in its wake. In spite of his early start, we usually beat Cameron to the yards to get the cattle loaded into the bugle and set the gates for the truck to pull through. All of our yards are designed with the road train in mind, so they allow for exceptionally wide turns and have “trucking gates” that allow the truck to pull up next to the loading chute and then drive straight out. Unlike American stock trailers, road trains load from the side. Obviously backing one of these rigs is a bit tricky.

Each trailer has 2 levels and each level has 2 bays. With cows we usually load 15 to a bay, but with smaller weaners we do 20-23. That’s as many as 276 animals per load. To move the cattle between cars there are “load throughs” – bridges that fold down between trailers and have sides that swing out and are chained into place. As soon as the truck hisses to a stop we all scramble up the sides, first setting the bottom load throughs and then balancing on the gates of the lower ones in order to set the top ones. This is hands down my favorite activity on the whole station. It’s like a jungle gym for adults. And they pay me for it.

Once the gates are all in place, we send the cattle up the race, one bay at a time, starting with the top level, loading from back to front. As each bay is filled, the gates are shut behind them and the load throughs are put up. To reach the top deck, the floor of the first trailer is lowered to form a ramp. Once all the top deck cattle are in place, the ramp is raised and we start with the bottom deck. When the cattle load fluidly everything moves quickly and we can usually load a road train in under half an hour. Unfortunately, when weaners get stubborn and start bailing up in the race it can take much longer. The whole process is VERY loud, with the deafening rumble and clatter of cattle trundling through the cars and ringers whooping and hollering, driving them up the race and to the back of the truck. The noise and the dust gives the process an air of excitement that would not be out of place in the Fort Worth stockyards at the turn of the century, loading trains of cattle bound for the east.