Melbourne, Australia – 14th November 2011 – “Crossing the Nullarbor” is a rite of passage for many Australian truck drivers. However, journeys across the harsh Nullarbor Plain are a daily routine for many of Kevin Small’s employees. And he knows all too well the challenges long-haul trucks can face on the bone-dry, treeless plain.

Kevin is the managing director of successful road freight company GKR Transport, which he launched as a one-truck operation at Welshpool, WA more than 26 years ago. Today, he oversees a 45-truck fleet that frequently handles east-west general freight runs. And he calculates that a truck breakdown can cost over $20,000 a week in lost revenue.

“Given that there aren’t truck shops dotted along the Nullarbor, I need to eliminate the risk of breakdown-induced downtime,” Kevin says.

Given the distances they’re travelling – around 400,000 kilometres annually – GKR Transport normally replaces its trucks approximately every three years.

So as a longstanding supporter of Cat engines, Kevin says the release in 2010 of the Cat® CT630 – the first-ever Cat on-road truck, and first launched in Australia – was always going to be of interest to him.

Following an initial once-over at the Perth Truck Show last July, GKR started their relationship with the new truck brand in purchasing two Cat CT630 90-tonne highway trucks for its east-west express freight movements.

Equipped with a 50-inch sleeper bunk and powered by a 550 hp Cat C15 engine, the two new trucks are now averaging over 8,000 km a week on the Perth-Melbourne and Perth-Sydney general freight runs.

Husband-Wife Driving Team Put CT630 to the Test, Find It “Phenomenal”

For the last three months, one of those two CT630s has been driven almost exclusively by the husband-wife truck driving team of Mark and Clare Bolitho. Their assessment so far: “It’s a phenomenal truck.”

Mark, who’s been driving for 24 years, has the distinction of being the first driver in Australia to drive a big triple combination with a gross capacity of 82 tonnes. Mark and Clare have been driving together for 15 years, and he considers her the best woman truck driver he’s ever seen. “But then, she learned from the best,” Mark says with a smile.

When Kevin Small offered Mark and Clare the chance to drive a CT630, Mark wasn’t sure at first what to think. He knew about the power of Cat from his father, who operated an Ingersoll-Rand oil drilling rig that used a Cat engine. But the tipping point came from Clare, who had driven another test Cat truck and was very impressed.

“I used to love my old Freightliner, but this Cat truck is far better at pulling the loads” Mark says. “As Patrick Swayze said in ‘Black Dog,’ ‘Ain’t nothin’ like a Caterpillar engine.”

Mark and Clare had proof of this on the first night they drove the truck. “As we started out to Adelaide, one of our fellow drivers was behind me in a Kenworth,” Mark says. “At first, we were going up a hill together, with him just behind me. But we left him behind like he was standing still.”

And this, Mark is quick to add, was at a point when the truck only had 694 km “on the clock.”

“Some engines don’t get the full potential of their power until they’ve been running for thousands and thousands of km and the pistons are bedded in,” Mark says. “With this truck, it was like someone had already done that job for us. And since then, it’s just gotten better and better.”