The John Kelly Transport business handles the chemicals, building supplies, plus a lot of work for Toll, it could be described as a general carrier. It runs nine B-triples and road trains a week into Adelaide, loaded with freight from a wide selection of its customers. Loaded singles and B-doubles are consolidated in Toowoomba into the larger combinations for the haul South-West.
B-triples are able to run straight into Adelaide, unloading at a small, rented depot there. There is one employee based there, who organises all the trucks and loads in and out of Adelaide. This has become much more simple to manage using the freight management software, enabling them to plan and organise movements.
All of the work going elsewhere is full loads heading out from Toowoomba to their destination. Two or three full loads head into Melbourne each week, direct into customers premises. Return loads tend to be full loads straight back out. There is one road train direct into Melbourne each week running on Performance Based Standards, at 36 metres long.
South Australia has good access since it opened up all its road networks, making life a lot easier to run B-triples right into Adelaide.
“It’s given us the opportunity to be able to run at a profit and run three trailers instead of two,” says Mitch Kelly, John Kelly’s grandson, who now runs John Kelly Transport. “With two trailers, we didn’t have the time to swap trailers, it would add another hour or so, because of our time critical freight, but now it barely adds any time at all.
“We do a road train over to Perth every fortnight, for another customer. The Northern Territory is really the only state we don’t service at the moment.”
In 2017, Mitch decided the business was switching over to Kenworth and Cummins as the truck and engine of choice.
“We had Freightliners with DD15s and then, I switched over to Kenworth and the Cummins engines,” says Mitch. “We’ve had Cats, we’ve had them all, we used to have Macks years ago. Realistically, the changes just came through with me.”
“I bought a lot of Kenworth T610 SAR trucks to do the Adelaide work and the B-triple work and they are smashing it, they’re fantastic. I highly rate them, the drivers like them. They’re comfy and they’re a bonneted trucks still.
“I’ve got a couple of manuals and we’ve got eight autos now, the ultra shift. I like them because of the fuel savings. We’ve got the Cummins Eaton ADEPT on them and we’re running them as down speeds, so they are 3.07:1 diffs. They are running B-triples at 80 tonnes sitting on 1400rpm, or thereabouts, all the way to Adelaide. It’s fairly flat road and they just plod along. With the Cummins Eaton ADEPT, they neutralise when they’re not using the engine.
“With the older trucks, we were putting in between 1250 and 1400 litres for a B-double from Adelaide to Brisbane. With the 610s, with the ADEPT in them, we’re putting in 1150 litres in at Adelaide with a B-triple, and it uses 1200 litres back into Brisbane. So, they are 100 to 250 litres a leg better off, and we’ve got an extra lead trailer.”
Even with the addition of the adblue needed on the newer Cummins X15 engines, the 1.85km/l is a major improvement on the previous trucks used.
“I’m definitely open to other options, I’m not blind,” says Mitch. “If there’s something out there that claims to be better fuel economy. I’ll give it every chance I can to make sure it is for real.”
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