Heavy haul the American way
Everything is bigger in the United States. Well, maybe not everything, but American vehicles certainly tend to be rather large. Case in point: my Peterbilt heavy haul.
I have been building minifigure scale heavy haulage vehicles for a couple of years now. They are vehicles carrying loads too large or heavy to be carried by a regular truck. Two examples are my modular truck carrying a transformer and a specialised windmill transporter. So far, all of them were European. For my next project, I wanted something different, though. I wanted an American truck.
The load is obviously central to these builds. In this case, I chose a large bulldozer: a Caterpillar D9. Building this made me realise how little I know about these things. I had no real concept of their size, for instance. Compared to a minifigure, it is pretty big, but I was surprised at how small the model is. Lego’s current City bulldozer dwarfs it. It was a fun build, though, with a lot of details.
The bulldozer may not be as a large as I thought it would be, but the real thing weighs about 50 tons. Hauling it obviously requires a specialised truck. Most European trucks are so-called cab-over-engine designs. American trucks tend to be more conventional, with the engine mounted under a long hood and the cab sitting behind that. I picked a classic Peterbilt, with a sleeper cab behind the driver. Peterbilt makes a range of tractors for heavy haul. Some of them have an extra rear axle, to better spread their weight. This can be raised when the tractor is not pulling a heavy trailer. Compared to a European counterpart, exemplified here by a German-built MAN TGX, all these features make it very long.
To carry the bulldozer, I built a low boy trailer. To distribute its weight, this too has quite a few axles. The standard is three, but it also has a so-called flip-axle at its rear. When the trailer is not carrying a load, this can be flipped up, reducing the length. In the down position, it reduces the weight on each axle.
Most European low loaders, used for a similar task, would have rear-wheel steering. Not this one, though. So, it is a good thing that American roads tend to be wide. This truck’s turning radius is enormous. To warn other road users, it carries red flags and “Wide Load” signs. Furthermore, it is accompanied by a pilot vehicle, similarly marked.
From pictures and road trips, I know these are often Japanese-built econoboxes, but I built a fairly simple pickup truck for this, loosely based on a vehicle I built a few years ago. All in all, the combination is about 76 studs long. It is big, beautiful and very American.
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