Up the Dusty Track | A Classic Road Trains Story

Some stories don’t age. They just gather dust, kilometres, and proof. First written more than twenty years ago, this classic Roadtrains story revisits Northwest Queensland, the Schmidts, and the equipment that is still out there working today.

A note from the author
Some stories don’t age. They just gather dust, kilometres, and proof.

I first wrote this story more than twenty years ago as part of a Haulmark Trailer customer testimonial, and it featured in one of our road trains documentary films, at a time when road trains in Northwest Queensland were still very much a working mystery to anyone who hadn’t stood beside one in the dirt. Back then, the brief was simple. Show how the gear performed in the real world. What it became was something else entirely. A snapshot of how work was done when conditions were unforgiving and durability was not a selling point but a requirement.

Today, Owen and Liz Schmidt are retired. The business they built has since been sold to a new generation. Yet much of the equipment featured in this story is still working somewhere out there in Northwest Queensland, scattered across stations and trucking companies, doing exactly what it was built to do. That, more than any testimonial ever could, says something about the country and the machinery that survives it.

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Northwest Queensland has a way of stripping things back to their essentials.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t threaten. It simply wears you down until whatever is not up to the task quietly falls away. Men, machines, ideas, excuses. Out here, everything is tested, and nothing is given a second chance.

We left Townsville before the sun had properly made up its mind. The sky was pale and undecided, the sort of washed out blue that belongs to early mornings in the north, when the heat has not arrived yet but you know it is coming. The road climbed steadily as we wound our way up over the new Hervey’s Range Road, the city falling away behind us with each bend. Traffic thinned. Radio stations faded. The country began to take over.

North or Charters Towers

Our meeting point was Blue Water Springs Roadhouse, roughly a hundred kilometres north of Charters Towers. It is one of those places that exists not because it is beautiful or convenient, but because it needs to. A pause between distances. A handshake between fuel stops. Beyond it, the bitumen gives up trying.

Owen Schmidt was coming the long way around. While we had taken the shortcut, Owen was hauling a full triple road train via Charters Towers, doing what stock carriers have always done. Following the routes that can actually take the weight.

Not long after first light, we saw him coming.

At first it was just a smudge on the horizon. Then a low brown haze, rolling and growing, until the shape of a Kenworth T650 emerged from the dust, steady and composed, three trailers faithfully following its lead. There was nothing hurried about it. No drama. Just a big truck doing exactly what it was built to do.

Owen and his wife Liz ran Schmidt Transport, a family business that grew quietly and steadily over decades. Not with grand plans or glossy brochures, but by saying yes to hard work and backing themselves when it counted.

“It was always Owen’s dream to have his own cattle truck,” Liz told me later. “I was twenty three when we bought our first one back in 1979. Now we have seven prime movers and thirty six decks of trailers.”

In the livestock world, decks are the language. Each level of a trailer counts as one deck. Upper. Lower. Front to back. When station owners book cattle, they don’t ask how many head first. They ask how many decks. Six decks. Twelve decks. Twenty four decks. Today’s job was six decks into Kilclooney Station, about seventy kilometres north of Blue Water Springs.

Most of that distance was not really a road. More a suggestion of one.

The Wet Season

The wet season had lingered far longer than anyone wanted this year. For weeks, the Burdekin and Douglas Rivers sat high against their bridges, turning access tracks into dead ends. Only recently had the water dropped far enough to make the run possible. Even then, the ground had not forgiven it.

As Owen eased the road train through the final cattle grid, dust boiled up around the trailers, hanging in the still air like smoke. Corrugations rattled through the cab. Washouts waited in the shadows. The track leaned away in places, as though it had lost interest in being level.

As the light strengthened over the yards, fine powder rose slowly from the ground, stirred more by movement than by wind. Cattle shifted their weight, heads low, breath puffing in the cool of the morning. Owen eased the lead trailer alongside the race, square and deliberate, no wasted motion.

One of the quiet efficiencies of these Haulmark livestock trailers reveals itself at moments like this. Owen could load the entire road train without shifting it an inch, using what is known as a through loader system. At each end of every trailer, a series of doors and ramps line up to form a walk through platform, allowing cattle to move calmly from one crate to the next. No uncoupling. No shuffling trailers back and forth. Just a steady, forward flow.

It is a simple idea, really. And like most good ideas in this country, it was born out of necessity.

Haulmark has been building livestock trailers in Brisbane for decades, refining designs not in isolation but in direct response to what drivers and operators needed in the paddock. Long before cattle road trains became commonplace, Haulmark was working alongside the legendary Noel Buntine, pioneering combinations that many said would not work, or should not.

Buntine did not have the luxury of ideal roads, perfect yards, or second chances. What he had was resourcefulness, and an understanding that anything working in northern Australia had to be overbuilt, repairable, and forgiving. Lessons learned then about load flow, stress points, suspension, access, and self sufficiency still echo through the trailers Owen was using today.

Early Lessons

Watching the cattle move quietly through the through loader doors, it was easy to see how those early lessons had been absorbed and refined. Nothing rushed. Nothing forced. The design worked with the animals, not against them, reducing stress and saving time, which in this business amounts to the same thing.

Out on the track, those same trailers showed another side of their thinking.

Further north, with the road train pulled up in a patch of scrub that passed for a rest area, Owen talked through one of the features you only appreciate when you are a long way from help. Belly tanks.

On each trailer sat a tank holding around 800 litres of diesel, insurance against distances that do not respect fuel gauges. With no service stations for five or six hundred kilometres in any direction, this was not a luxury. It was survival.

The system was as straightforward as it was effective. A coiled hose stowed neatly behind the landing gear on each trailer could be linked together, trailer to trailer, keeping fittings clean and ready. Owen explained how the hose ends stayed coupled with a joiner, partly to keep them tidy, partly to keep dust out where it mattered.

When it was time to transfer fuel, the process took around twenty minutes. Not fast, but reliable. No pumps screaming. No electronics to fail. Just air pressure from the trailer, good access, and a design that assumed you might be doing this job somewhere a long way from anyone else.

That philosophy, expect isolation, plan for it, build accordingly, is pure Noel Buntine. And it is why so many of these trailers, built years ago in Brisbane sheds, are still earning their keep across Northwest Queensland today.

Owen’s combination was not new. It was not shiny. It did not need to be. It was straight, square, and still doing exactly what it was designed to do, long after the original decals had faded.

At the yards, Owen climbed down, rolled his shoulders once, and tucked his jeans into his dogger boots before stepping straight into mud that swallowed his soles without apology.

These were old yards. Proper ones. Heavy timber rails bleached by decades of sun. Gates scarred and smoothed by countless hands. White ants and borers have forced most stations toward steel these days, but these yards were still standing, stubborn as the country itself.

The gate creaked every time Owen swung it open, a sound that felt older than any of us. You could imagine drovers from another era hearing that same protest, working cattle through the same funnel long before diesel engines and air suspensions arrived.

Rough Country

“Most of our work is like this,” Owen said, watching the cattle settle and move. “Rough country. Undulating. Some of these tracks are nothing more than four wheel drive trails. Cattle might only come out once a year.”

Out here, that reality dictates everything, especially the trucks.

There is nothing light duty about a Kenworth T650 built for this life. Owen’s fleet runs steel spring Big 6 rear suspension, heavy duty steel springs under the trailers, and a chassis designed to take punishment without complaint. Up front, the reinforced cross member and full length double row chassis rails give the truck its backbone.

“It is the only way to go out here,” Owen said, nodding toward the massive spring pack on the lead trailer. “Some of the washouts are so bad you have to stop and crawl. Even then, you are always thinking about springs.”

Loaded stock trucks carry their weight high, and these tracks do not play fair. They are pushed through scrub with a bulldozer, maybe smoothed by a grader if luck is on your side. Corners lean the wrong way. Cambers fall downhill.

“That is where the six rod suspension really earns its keep,” Owen said. “She stays planted.”

Under the bonnet, Schmidt Transport ran a mix of powerplants. Two of the T650s were Cummins powered, one a mechanical triple four bought second hand, another running a Signature. The rest were Caterpillar C 15s and C 16s.

“Our oldest Cat is in for its first rebuild now,” Liz said. “Just over one point eight million kilometres. First time it has been touched.”

Numbers like that do not come from luck. Out here, maintenance is survival.

“We do not believe in extended oil drains,” Owen said. “Every time a truck comes home, it goes over the pit. Dust and mud get into everything. Keep the grease up and you save yourself grief later.”

Breakdowns are not an inconvenience in livestock work. They are unacceptable.

Distances are getting longer

“Once the cattle are on, they need to keep moving,” Liz said. “Distances are getting longer all the time. Reliability is not optional.”

Queensland’s livestock industry operates under concessions designed with animal welfare in mind. Livestock loading is by volume rather than weight, allowing cattle to stand properly. Extended driving hours when loaded reduce unnecessary stops that leave cattle standing in crates longer than they should.

“It is better for the animals,” Liz said. “And better for everyone.”

The Schmidts were never content to stand still. They were among the first to trial and gain approval for the BAB Quad combination in Queensland, coupling two B Doubles with a converter dolly.

“The flexibility is everything,” Liz explained. “When we come off a road train route onto a B Double route, we can split the combination and shuttle with one prime mover. With traditional triples, we needed three trucks. It saves time, money, and reduces how long the cattle are on board.”

That mindset saw Liz recognised as Transport Woman of the Year, an honour she never chased.

“I just wanted a better industry,” she said.

When asked about the hardest part of the job, she did not hesitate.

“The paperwork.”

And the future.

“Drivers,” she said. “We need people who can drive and handle cattle. Skilled drivers are thin on the ground.”

By the time we packed up, Owen was already easing the loaded road train back onto the track, dust rising once more as he pointed the Kenworth south toward Charters Towers. That night the cattle would unload at the saleyards, be dipped at first light, then reload for the long haul west to Longreach.

Another job done. Another reminder that out here, the gear you choose matters.

Service life is not a marketing phrase in Northwest Queensland. It is measured in kilometres, breakdowns avoided, and cattle delivered on time. By that measure, the Kenworth T650 and Haulmark trailers have earned their reputation many times over.

Long after the story was written, the proof is still rolling across the country in dust and kilometres.

This story was originally written more than two decades ago and has been lightly edited for republication.