Prime Feature

Fleet Focus

32 Hit the Ground Running

As one of the largest independently owned transport companies of its kind, Direct Freight Express reinforces the formidable national footprint it has forged with modern trucks from key supplier, Isuzu.

38 Persistence of Vision

Sunshine Coast carrier, Gibson Sand & Gravel, is one of three fleets in Australia asked to give a 12-month appraisal of the new Western Star 48X.

42 Through the Roof

Alpine Truss uses its own fleet of Mack trucks to deliver roof trusses and wall frames from its manufacturing facility in Wangaratta.

TRUCK & TECH

46 Access All Areas

Several new Freightliner Cascadia units have won favour with the team at Burdett’s in Melbourne owing in part to the clear gains shown by the sophisticated Detroit Connect telematics.

Running two transport businesses at once may be difficult at times, but Cropline Group has found SAF-Holland components across a large portion of both its fleets has made the process much more seamless.

TEST DRIVE

66 Home Grown

An interstate trip from Melbourne to Adelaide pulling a pair of Collins Transport refrigerated trailers proves a breeze for the new Kenworth K220.

William Craske Editor

It’s time to talk rigids — rigid airships that is. It’s been more than a century since the modern airship transformed transatlantic travel, using fuel cell technology, that at least for the moment, is very much back in vogue. Today considered unique in terms of their variety of potential applications, fuel cells can use a wide range of fuels and feedstocks including hydrogen which is being afforded some particularly optimistic forecasts by those, namely OEMs, with skin in the game. Of the concepts long-gestating in closed-door research departments shrouded in secrecy for months, if not years, how many hark back to previous eras when the political capital necessary for high-cost ventures of research and development, had simply run dry?

The Zeppelin, which came to be commonly used to refer to all rigid airships, were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffaharts, the world’s first airline in revenue service. By 1928, when a round trip transatlantic ticket cost $3,000 – equivalent to $40,000 today – the Graf Zeppelin was launched and soon set a new long-range voyage record in October. The largest airship of