Bizarrely, Australia tried pulling trains using semi trucks with surprising results

Australia doesn’t sound like a place where you expect semi-trucks pulling trains, but that’s what actually happened in the 1990s.

It surely sounds like a wild experiment, but back then, the Australian railroad decided to pull train cars using semi-trucks, and the results were surprising.

Unexpectedly, it worked, and soon it became a common sight in the country — at least for a while.

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The time when semi-trucks pulled train cars in Australia

The story takes us back in time when a 1996 Western Star 4900 semi-truck was transformed into a road-transferable locomotive.

A rare footage uploaded on YouTube by emdB67 shows the semi-truck in action.

Also known as RTL1, these vehicles were equipped with train air brakes and sent to Australia to help V/Line Freight.

The plan was to use RTL1 to pull train cars on short tracks where regular trains had trouble.

They were also useful on fragile, unused tracks where a regular train would be too heavy and risky to use.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a vehicle has surprised everyone by pulling something it wasn’t supposed to. A Land Rover Defender once famously towed a towing truck, surprising the bystanders.

Back to the RTL1, they could easily switch between roads and rail, making it a versatile means of transportation.

RLT1 wasn’t a permanent solution

For about three months in 1998, the RTL1 made several trips daily, proving that this small vehicle could indeed pull a larger and heavier one.

However, despite its early success, the RTL1 semi-truck had its fair share of problems.

Pulling a train car with a semi-truck worked well at first, but over time it caused a lot of tire wear and traction problems on the steel rails.

Soon the Australian railroad understood that this unconventional idea was not going to work any further.

Not long after that, the use of the RLT1 semi-truck declined, and it was repurposed for track maintenance after completing its 20 years of service.