Over the past two years, Wynnum Haulage, owned and managed by Paul ‘Buddha’ and Tina Bailey, has been successfully delivering freight containers in a quartet of Cat Trucks.
The operation is based in the dock area of Brisbane, with a business office in the bay-side suburb of Wynnum. With 11 trucks in the fleet plus container-lift machinery, the business shunts boxes from ships in the container terminal to a multitude of destinations.
Buddha Bailey says the best thing about the Cat Trucks is their dependability.
“I can count on them. I have not had to touch them, we’ve had good run with them,” he says of the two CT610s and two CT630s.
Bailey is particularly pleased with the 13-litre CT610s with their balance of fuel economy and dependability, but he says he has been blown away by the power and torque of the 15 litre C15 engines in the CT630s.
“When I brought one up from Melbourne as a b-double, I put a good load on it and it wanted more! It was seriously a case of, ‘oh my god!’ No matter what you throw at it, it just gets up and performs. It will pull up the Gateway Bridge in top gear with a heavy load on. Unbelievable,” he says.
Bailey says he took a CT610 Cat Truck on trial thinking he’d get a couple of weeks ‘free work’. But both he and the drivers liked the truck so much, “We asked the finance bloke what he could do and it went from there,” he adds.
The Wynnum Haulage operation is very much a family affair with Tina heading up the three-person admin and office side of the business, while Buddha keeps the trucks rolling.
Organising an 11-truck fleet in what is mostly a short-haul operation can be complex. The drivers have a rolling start time, with trucks heading out between three and five o’clock in the morning.
“I try to turn them around with an empty box for dehiring,” Buddha says.
“The more we deliver the more money we make for the day so we have to keep them going. The name of the game is prioritising freight in the yard.”
The first new Cat Truck came into the fleet two years ago, followed six months later by the first CT630. Two more Cat acquisitions followed.
With the trucks running predominantly in urban industrial areas, this is not a high-mileage vocation. The CT630 running in a b-double application is six months old and has knocked up 40,000 kilometres.
“That truck has had a few trips away, I like to get it on a longer run at least once a month to give it a bit of a ‘clean-out. I expect it will do about 100,000 clicks per year,” says Bailey.
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