by Nick Drew | Wed 15 Aug 2018
Big kit spotted in Toowoomba
Its always a pleasure to receive photos from jobs “Down Under” in Australia and although we don’t get as many these days, we do get the occasional contributions from our friends down there, in this instance once again from Martin Grant.
Martin, who is well known for his heavy haulage photography, recently took a trip up north from his home in Sydney, New South Wales to Toowoomba in Queensland for a haulage assignment, but whilst up there a mate told him about the massive Toowoomba Bypass project that is going on locally. The 41km-long bypass route will when completed, run from the Warrego Highway at Helidon Spa in the east to the Gore Highway at Athol in the west, via Charlton. There are some serious bits of kit in action on the site and Martin was able to get a few shots from the roadside.
The project is being undertaken by Nexus Infrastructure Pty Ltd and has a projected total cost of $1.606 billion Australian dollars which includes a contribution of $1.137 billion from the Australian government. The project is well underway now, but in the early days of the job according to Martin it was common to encounter the really big machines in action right next to the road and it was on one of those stretches of road where Martin was able to get these shots featuring one of the prime movers on the job, a Hitachi EX1200 hydraulic excavator.
The big 120 tonne class Hitachi excavator has been kept busy loading a fleet of 90 tonne class Caterpillar 777D dumptrucks supplied by Queensland based Salmon Earthmoving Services as is the excavator.
Another interesting set up is this Komatsu PC450 which is equipped with a hydraulic tilting bucket. Apparently its quite common to see 40-50 tonne excavators with tilting buckets in Australia.
This is a pretty large project and to give you some idea of the scale of it, here is an interesting video featuring drone footage of the entire jobsite from the start to where it will eventually finish.
The Digger Man Blog would like to thank Martin Grant for sharing the photos contained within this blog, cheers mate!