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Celebrating 100 years of the Gascoyne Trading Company - the trucking operation built up by Kingsford Smith


onetrack

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They were the lifeline to the North of W.A., especially in the transport of perishable goods. When the W.A. State Shipping Service was operating, a lot of non-perishable freight went North on the State Ships, but as the roads in the North improved and the SSS costs got ever higher - and trucking costs got lower - the trucking operations won out.

 

Gascoyne Trading regularly hauled a huge amount of produce from Carnarvon back to the South, and later on, they went into semi-tippers and ore haulage in the Goldfields. There's a lot of good Gascoyne Trading truck photos on Flickr.

I lived in Bassendean as a kid and the Gascoyne Trading operations were just over the Perth-Midland railway line and I would see "Gassers" Mercs coming and going on a daily basis.

 

They didn't start road-training until the late 1960's or early 1970's, as road trains were banned in W.A. up until then, due to highway safety concerns, and the fact that very few prime movers were capable of pulling two trailers, back then.

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4 hours ago, onetrack said:

They didn't start road-training until the late 1960's or early 1970's, as road trains were banned in W.A. up until then, due to highway safety concerns, and the fact that very few prime movers were capable of pulling two trailers, back then.

It's hard to imagine with the way things are now. Thinking back, in the early 70's most of our local transport companies around here were still running V8 petrol prime movers. They were doing well to pull an 18 ton load on a single drive prime mover/bogie trailer setup.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 05/02/2024 at 12:22 AM, willedoo said:

The other trucks I remember up in the Kimberleys were the Buntine road trains carting cattle.

We had those carting cattle to Point Stuart Station in the NT. Four trucks if I remember correcting, but that was in 1984. The driver had a special seat installed for his back 🙂

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12 minutes ago, willedoo said:

I had to look that one up. Crocodile country by the look of it.

Yeah, out Kakadu way but the meat works shut down. Tourist attraction with Shady Camp nearby on the Mary River. I did some pro fishing there as well. 

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