Скачать или смотреть Old Warringah Split Truck Pt 1

This video represents a blast from the past, something we haven’t seen for a number of years and a truck type which finished collecting Warringah rubbish in 2009. Prior to the current contract held by URM, Collex (Veolia) had a 5 year collection deal with Warringah to handle all the council waste services. To take care of household garbage and recycling collections, the company ordered 9 split vehicles with upper and lower body compartments. When the council sent a flyer around advertising the divided trucks, I initially thought we were going to get split bins, but then I became aware of the concept involving a truck capable of emptying two bins in a single pass! At the time it was relatively new technology in Australia with only a handful of other locations utilising these divided Superior Pak side loaders, however dozens of them could be found working in Brisbane. Veolia operated split trucks in Warringah from July 2004 to July 2009 and after a while I did get bored of them, but now I look back and miss the cool and unique machines they were. You don’t often find such split trucks servicing urban residential areas these days, instead they’re mainly found in a small group of councils which feature scattered rural services.

How these trucks worked, the Superior Pak Single Pass had separate horizontal body compartments (of different volume) to contain the two waste streams and featured independent tailgate systems to release and unload the materials separately. As for bin loading, the same grab lifter was used to empty the bins into the same hopper, however the hopper set-up was different to that of a standard Raptor side loader. At the top of the hopper entrance was a steel diverter flap, operated left/right manually to close off one chamber and open the other for loading the given waste stream. Thus garbage would fall to the bottom of the hopper and recycling would be caught higher up on the right side of the hopper. The packer itself acted as the primary divider in conjunction with the diverter flap, keeping garbage separate from recyclable material. The packer was made up of two parts, being the standard pendulum blade from a Raptor side loader, which would sweep the lower hopper chamber, then there was a large block mounted on top of the standard pendulum which cleared the upper hopper chamber. The packer was a single moving mechanism powered by the same actuators, which would retract in one compartment while packing in another and do the opposite action on its second stroke.

I shot this footage on an April Friday during the third last month of work in Warringah, with 334 servicing Collaroy Plateau on paper and garbage week (bottles and garbage got collected on alternate weeks). Contrary to the signage on these trucks, paper and cardboard was actually loaded into the lower compartment and garbage was emptied into the top, due to the fact there was more recycling than garbage so the larger body capacity was needed. While cardboard fell effortlessly to the lower and larger hopper chamber, bagged garbage would often overflow in the upper and shallow top hopper, with the packer regularly struggling to keep up with incoming material. For this reason drivers hated paper week, because it was a slower task and required stuffing around like using the divider flap to help clear the top hopper and revving the engine to speed up the packer. This situation is what let these trucks down, which was an even bigger issue in areas like Brisbane which use larger 240Ls for comingled recycling. While these split vehicles shined during bottles week in Warringah, they would’ve been substantially better in general if they were used to collect paper and bottle bins on the same week, with the perfect body volumes and hopper set-up to handle each light weight stream in the lower and upper sections respectively.

Anyway I’ll wrap it up here! I hope you enjoy this last video and the other shorter one I uploaded of bottles week, plus forgive me about the dirty camera lens mixed in with sun glare - took this before I was fully conscious of such issues. There are also heaps of other videos of these trucks to see throughout my uploads, including an animation of the pendulum packer and various hopper camera videos to show what goes on inside the machine. I’m still absolutely devastated I never came home with an unloading video of these trucks, which I actually took of two units unloading crashing glass side by side, but due to bullshit site rules I had to delete what I took. It would’ve been awesome to drive these old Warringah split trucks at some point for the different and awesome experience, but that won’t happen now. However perhaps in future I’ll somehow make it behind the wheel of another divided residential side loader.