I still recall that Monday morning I did my very first shift at Auburn Council, I jumped in ACCO p41 and finally lived out a dream. One thing I didn’t expect during that second half of 2013 was the delivery of a couple brand new collection trucks, being side loader 1296 and rear loader 1297. Whilst I never had anything to do with that Hino rear loader, I spent considerable time steering and operating this Hino FM side arm with the MJ GenV. Initially I was excited to have a go at this fresh and unfamiliar truck, I was actually completely lost when I got in the cab for the first time, but eventually I figured it out and we got along quite fine. However, after a while I got a bit over it and felt like the odd one out in the waste services crew. I really missed driving the ACCOs my colleagues were paired up with - only when one of them was on holidays would I get into those 2008 Ivecos, which wasn’t often enough!
The council was trialling trucks for the next fleet purchase and these couple Hinos came around as a result of that, but I learnt the bloke in charge of equipment procurement was also on a mission to save dollars and went down the cheapest path available at the time. In the end the council took the body off this Hino and remounted it onto a new ACCO cab chassis, which still exists today as original unit T1 or T2 under the URM Cumberland contract. There were some problems experienced with this Hino, in particular faults with the regen burn off, the very poor acceleration power during driving was also not favoured. It wasn’t all bad but, it was comfy and quiet in the cab, everything about the interior was good except the push button maxi brake, the exhaust brake and Telma retarder were epic at slowing the truck too. 1296 got the job done, was just different from the rest of the group, in which case the others wanted nothing to do with it.
This side loader also came with the Extend-A-Slide feature which was still relatively new to the market, I exaggerated the stopping distance in this video to properly demo it. The large convex mirror threw me off and was a tricky thing to get used to for emptying bins, I never considered angling the flat rectangular mirror down for picking up! I do give an overkilled shot of the mirror in this video to see what the perspective was, it showed a great wide angle anyway. I had to include a cab view as usual, as you’ll hear it’s very quiet in there, apart from the 80s classic tune pumping on the radio haha The council branding and body livery was very different on the two Hinos as well, putting recycling education down as the suitable theme, but I’m sure it was a lost cause. Somebody videoed me collecting green waste with 1296 way back, but that footage has since been deleted, so all we have to see of this ex-Auburn rig now is right here, hope you enjoy!
15 мар 2024
