CAT Operators - Wynnum Haulage

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CAT Trucks Australia / Navistar Auspac Press Release  /  July 13, 2016

A quartet of Cat Trucks leads a successful container haulage operation into the daily battle of getting freight to its destination, scores of times each day.

Over the past two years, Wynnum Haulage has invested in the Cat Trucks, one at a time as each predecessor proved itself.

Wynnum Haulage is owned and managed by Paul ‘Buddha’ and Tina Bailey. The tidy operation is based in the dock area of Brisbane with a business office in the bayside suburb of Wynnum. With eleven trucks in the fleet plus container-lift machinery, the business shunts boxes from dock to storage sheds to clients and with occasional longer runs to deliver containers to destinations.

Early morning starts see the Cat Trucks on Brisbane’s roads and motorways distributing containers just unloaded 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.

Buddha reckons he 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 sheer power and torque of the 15 litre C15 engines in the CT630s.

“The C15s are brilliant, the torque is just amazing. 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.”

With a grin Buddha 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.”

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.

The C15s are brilliant, the torque is just amazing.

“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’,” says Buddha. “I expect it will do about 100,000 clics per year.”

“Over the years I’ve pulled into a lot of customers premises with an old banger leaking oil. You go to pull out of the driveway and it’s not a good image mate, especially when they’ve got brand-new concrete and you have to say, ‘Sorry!’ You turn up with good gear and the customers like it.”

And Cat Trucks are the good gear leading a successful family business into the high demands of the 21st Century.

CAT CT610 brochure - http://www.cattrucks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CT610_SpecSheet.pdf

CAT CT630 brochure - http://www.cattrucks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CT630_SpecSheet.pdf

CAT truck website - http://www.cattrucks.com.au/trucks/

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The TranStar-based CT610 has a Euro-5 (near EPA2007) emissions variant of Navistar’s MAN-licensed D2676 (MaxxForce 13).

The ProStar-based CT630 has a Euro-5 (near EPA2007) emissions Caterpillar C15.

Australia's ADR80/03 emissions standard is the equivalent of the global Euro-5 standard.