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Thursday, March 15, 2007
"If I take my foot off the accelerator, it'll take us about four kilometres to stop," says Matt Langley, macho Aussie captain of The Centipede - at 181.5ft and 205 tonnes, what is claimed to be the world's longest truck in regular service (another mad Aussie drove a 1000ft truck half a mile into the record books last year). Langley's assertion is not so comforting when put into context. One false move on the narrow 80-mile bush track from McArthur River Mine to the port at Bing Bong along the crocodile-infested Gulf of Carpentaria would have The Centipede, its 110 wheels, its six massive trailers and your writer crashing catastrophically into the scenery. But Matt is light-fingered. His delicate touch on the enormous steering wheel controls AU$1m-worth of zinc and lead ore. And reassuringly, in the first two years of shuttling piles of precious powdered minerals, the pair of 550bhp 14-litre Western Star trucks have had just one accident.
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