Why LinCon is building an all-wheel-drive Scania fleet
At 75 metres above the ground, the truck beneath you stops looking like a truck and starts looking like a rather important insurance policy. LinCon makes its living putting people where ladders, common sense and ordinary cherry pickers fear to venture. Getting them there increasingly falls to an expanding fleet of Scania 6x6s, 8x8s—and one rather serious 660 hp V8.
LinCon’s new 660 hp Scania V8 and Drake widening low-loader have been assembled for the company’s largest interstate transport assignments.
There are companies that hire out cherry pickers. Then there is LinCon Hire and Sales, which operates at the end of the market where a cherry picker has grown up, discovered heavy engineering and developed ambitions of reaching the clouds.
Founded in Brisbane by Colleen Lindores in 2001 and now run by Colleen and her son Craig, LinCon has become Australia’s leading specialist in the hire, sale, servicing and repair of truck-mounted elevating work platforms.
It has offices in every state capital and around 140 vehicles scattered across the country.
At one end of the fleet is a relatively modest 13-metre EWP mounted on a ute. At the other is a 103-metre Palfinger platform fitted to a five-axle Tadano crane carrier.
That is roughly the height of a 30-storey building, and an awfully long way to climb before discovering the correct spanner is still in the toolbox.
LinCon is the largest Palfinger platform dealer in the Southern Hemisphere and also represents Italian under-bridge inspection-equipment manufacturer Barin.
Its machines can be found erecting wind turbines, maintaining telecommunications towers, inspecting transmission lines, reaching beneath bridges and supporting mining and infrastructure projects in some exceedingly inconvenient parts of Australia.
They could presumably rescue a cat from a tree as well, although sending a 36-tonne boom truck would suggest either a particularly tall tree or an exceptionally important cat.
The head-on view reveals the sheer width and ground clearance of LinCon’s Scania 460P XT as it sits aboard the Drake low-loader.
LinCon’s 20-year relationship with Scania
LinCon celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026 and has been buying Scania trucks for 20 of those years.
This year alone it has taken delivery of five new Scania 6x6s, with another 15 Scania 8x8s ordered for delivery during the next 12 months.
The low-roof Scania P-series is LinCon’s preferred foundation, available in 4×4, 6×6 and 8×8 configurations.
Four-wheel drive is fashionable on vehicles that rarely venture beyond the supermarket car park. On a LinCon truck, however, all-wheel drive is there because the machine may need to crawl along a transmission-line corridor, cross a half-built wind farm or reach a mine site where the road builders appear to have lost interest halfway through the job.
Getting bogged is inconvenient at the best of times. Getting bogged with a machine capable of lifting someone 75 metres into the air requires a considerably larger recovery vehicle, and possibly a difficult telephone call to head office.
Once fitted with their Palfinger platforms, some of LinCon’s Scania 8x8s weigh around 36 tonnes.
The larger trucks use Scania’s 13-litre Super six-cylinder engine producing 500 hp, while the 6x6s are fitted with the 460 hp version.
According to LinCon Technical Sales Manager Tony Fish, who has been with the company for 20 years, plenty of power and torque are not indulgences. They are basic survival equipment.
“We’ve always gone for higher-horsepower engines because we do a lot of travelling and we need to get up hills easily,” Tony says.
“We need a good cooling package because the trucks are working in hot weather and running the PTO hard.”
That second requirement is easily overlooked.
These trucks might not cover the annual kilometres of a linehaul prime mover, but reaching the job is only the beginning. Once there, the engine can spend hour after hour driving the hydraulic platform through the power take-off—often while sitting in the sort of heat that makes bitumen reconsider its career choices.
A four-axle Scania 460P XT boom truck is carefully positioned aboard LinCon’s Drake low-loader.
Five arrive, another 15 are ordered
LinCon has recently taken delivery of five 64-metre Palfinger platforms mounted on Scania 6×6 chassis.
Ten Scania 8x8s fitted with 75-metre platforms are on order, together with another five 8x8s carrying 64-metre Palfingers.
The completed machines travel a fair distance before turning a wheel in Australia.
“When the truck is built by Scania in Europe, it is sent to Palfinger in Germany to have the EWP fitted,” Tony explains.
“Then it is shipped to Australia, where we have load-sharing suspension fitted by Suspension Services to increase our front-axle limit to 16 tonnes.”
LinCon’s Barin under-bridge inspection machines are also built on Scania chassis, although these use full air suspension.
“We dump all the air out of them when extending the arm, as the truck becomes a more rigid and stable platform,” Tony says.
That may not sound especially dramatic, but with a long hydraulic arm hanging over the side of a bridge, rigidity is one of those qualities everyone suddenly becomes extremely enthusiastic about.
Palfinger itself helped point LinCon towards Scania.
“We’ve focused on Scania partly because Palfinger in Germany adopted the Scania chassis for the 10×4 90-metre machines they’re building,” Tony says.
“They suggested we use Scania, and that hasn’t been a bad thing at all—especially because everybody likes them.”
A LinCon team member supervises as the Scania 460P XT boom truck is carefully positioned on the Drake low-loader.
The Mick Stagg test
Engineering compatibility might get a truck onto the purchase order, but driver acceptance determines whether everybody remains happy with the decision.
After one of the new Scanias arrived through Scania Richlands, it was sent south to LinCon’s Melbourne operation and handed to driver Mick Stagg.
It apparently did not take Mick long to form an opinion.
“The next thing I know, he’s on the phone to me saying, ‘This truck is absolutely fantastic, mate. It’s unreal,’” Tony recalls.
“It’s always good to get positive feedback.”
Particularly when a driver telephones voluntarily and the opening words are not, “You’re not going to believe what just happened.”
LinCon’s 660 hp Scania R 660 V8 and Drake low-loader prepare to transport a four-axle Scania boom truck.
A Scania V8 for the biggest platform
While the all-wheel-drive rigids do the work at the sharp end, LinCon has also taken delivery of its first Scania V8.
The R 660 is a 130-tonne-rated prime mover that will pull a Drake widening low-loader carrying the company’s enormous 103-metre Palfinger platforms.
These platforms are mounted on five-axle Tadano crane carriers that are not road registered. When one is required at a wind-farm construction site, the entire machine must climb aboard the Drake and be transported there.
With an 8×8 carrier, dolly and float, the complete combination will weigh around 95 tonnes.
The Drake trailer can widen to 4.3 metres, although LinCon expects most movements to be made at approximately 3.5 metres. The combination is just under 26 metres long, allowing it to travel without a pilot vehicle in most states.
It will not be an inconspicuous vehicle.
While waiting for the trailer to be commissioned, LinCon found another job for the R 660’s newly employed driver. He took a Scania 6×6 from Queensland to Perth and returned in a comparable 6×6 from another manufacturer.
This was not a laboratory-controlled fuel trial with matching weather, traffic and road conditions. It was, however, enough to get the driver’s attention.
“He said the Scania was just so much better on fuel than the other truck,” Tony says. “He was amazed by the fuel saving.”
Fuel consumption matters because attaching an enormous lattice of steel and hydraulics to a truck does little for its relationship with the atmosphere.
“Aerodynamically, the EWPs are a heavy brick on wheels, so the fuel savings will be valuable to us,” Tony says.
“Our machines are always running fully laden because the boom is bolted to the truck.
“When the R 660 has the 8×8 on the back, together with the dolly and float, the combination is going to be around 95 tonnes, so good fuel numbers will be a benefit.”
Calling one of these machines a brick on wheels may actually be slightly unfair to the brick. A brick is at least relatively smooth and contains very few hydraulic pipes, access platforms or outriggers.
A LinCon Scania 460P XT carrying a Bronto Skylift S70XR platform sits securely aboard the company’s multi-axle Drake low-loader.
Two hundred kilometres beyond Newman
Much of LinCon’s current work is being driven by mining, renewable-energy and power-transmission projects in Western Australia.
The company has recently commenced work on a transmission line supplying a wind farm and mine approximately 200 kilometres from Newman in the Pilbara.
Ten LinCon trucks are involved, supported by 14 or 15 drivers working on rotation.
The project is expected to run for around two years. Because sending a truck back to civilisation every time it requires attention would be both expensive and tedious, LinCon has fitted out a large ute and trailer with service equipment and spare parts so maintenance can be performed on site.
Other LinCon machines are working on a powerline extension through Wagga Wagga, while repair and maintenance work for Powerlink and Ergon regularly sends crews into remote parts of Queensland.
“Our blokes will jump in the truck and head north,” Tony says.
“They’ll have six or seven repairs to do and can be gone for a month, although they sleep in hotels.
“Years ago, we had a job putting in a line from Townsville to Cairns across the top of the Great Dividing Range. The trucks pulled up each night at the top of the hill, and they sent a helicopter in to pick up the work team and take them to a hotel.
“That job went for five or six months. But that’s why we buy all-wheel-drive trucks—we need to be able to access any terrain.”
If the accommodation shuttle requires a helicopter, it is probably fair to say the trucks have left the highway behind.
A hard life without the kilometres
LinCon’s trucks do not necessarily accumulate enormous mileages. Their engines, however, can work long hours operating the PTO while the wheels remain perfectly still.
It is a very different duty cycle from highway transport.
The elevating platforms undergo a major inspection every 90 days, and LinCon initially serviced the truck chassis at the same time. That meant changing the engine oil at around 250 hours.
“One of our oil suppliers said we should take samples to see how the oil was holding up at 250 hours on the Scanias,” Tony says.
“It was still like new, so we settled on oil changes at 400 hours, where the oil is still fine.
“We’re probably still way over-servicing them, but oil is cheaper than a breakdown or sending another driver and truck down to relieve a broken-down truck.”
That last sentence probably explains more about LinCon’s maintenance philosophy than any collection of workshop charts.
A breakdown is never desirable. A breakdown involving a highly specialised platform working hundreds of kilometres from the nearest depot can rapidly become a logistical expedition.
Moving one of LinCon’s largest truck-mounted EWPs requires plenty of deck space, numerous axles and a prime mover with rather more than modest ambitions.
The value of someone answering the telephone
Reliability is one reason LinCon continues to buy Scania, but Tony says the relationship with Scania Richlands is equally important.
“The Scanias have been very reliable in service. They haven’t given trouble,” he says.
“The relationship we have with Scania Richlands is very good and very close.
“One of the Scania account managers, Seamus Devlin, actually came to work for us a few years ago, and now he is back at Scania.
“I’m dealing with Mark ten Broeke, who will bend over backwards for us. I know if there’s an issue or I need to know something, if I can’t get hold of Mark, I can call Seamus and I will get an answer.”
Truck manufacturers devote considerable effort to selling horsepower, technology and fuel economy. Yet when a machine is sitting beside a powerline somewhere beyond Newman, the most valuable feature can be a knowledgeable human being who answers the telephone.
Scania National Fleet Sales Manager Mark ten Broeke believes the combination of the P-series all-wheel-drive chassis and 13-litre Super engine suits LinCon’s unusual operating demands.
“Fuel consumption, even when hauling a boom truck, is exceptional, and the P 500 power output and easily accessed torque make the driver’s job so much easier and less fatiguing,” Mark says.
“Adding our advanced driver-assistance safety package and standard-fit side-curtain rollover airbags means the Scania all-wheel-drive product really stacks up for operators who work off-road as much as on-road.”
LinCon’s Scania R 660 V8 hauls a Scania 460P XT truck-mounted EWP aboard its Drake low-loader.
Why LinCon keeps buying Scania
Strip away the unusual machinery and LinCon’s reasons for buying Scania are refreshingly uncomplicated.
The trucks have enough power to haul heavy platforms across the country without turning every hill into a long-running drama. The all-wheel-drive chassis can take those platforms beyond the bitumen. The cooling system copes with long hours of PTO operation, fuel consumption is surprisingly good for vehicles shaped like industrial scaffolding, and the drivers actually enjoy using them.
Most importantly, they have proved reliable, and LinCon has a strong enough relationship with Scania Richlands to know that help will be available when something does go wrong.
The Palfinger platform may be the part that rises 75 metres into the sky and attracts all the attention.
But before it can do that, somebody must haul 36 tonnes of truck and machinery across Australia, turn off the highway and drive it along a track that possibly exists only because another vehicle went there yesterday. That less glamorous job belongs to the Scania underneath.
And if LinCon’s latest order book is any indication, it is doing it rather well.
