The average pickup truck can pull maybe a couple of tons, but a semi-trailer can pull nearly 30 tons. A rail car, however, is an order of magnitude heavier, with some weighing over 150 tons. Using a semi-trailer to pull rail cars seems like as good an idea as trying to move a prefab house with a pickup truck. But that’s exactly what one Australian rail company did in a pinch, and it worked better than you might imagine. Mainly because the adaptation brought problems that might not be the ones you’d expect.

Documentation of this story is limited because some of the primary sources are victims of linkrot. The pages are gone; we only have second-hand accounts of the contents. However, as a supplement to the primary sources that still exist, they are sufficient to begin our story sometime in 1995 with the production of a 1996 Western Star Trucks 4900 semi-trailer.

This truck would find its way to Australia via Canada (hi Seabiscuit) via Brundt Industries, who reportedly converted it into what they call a “road-going locomotive.” That’s a road vehicle that can also be used to haul rail cars. It’s basically a hi-rail like the Polaris with fold-down railroad wheels like the ones the Los Angeles subway uses, but on the scale of a semi-truck. That sounds like both every four-year-old boy’s dream and an impossible niche device – in what scenario could The be the best tool for the job? Well, as always with automotive cryptids, the purpose is as unique as the vehicle.

The truck, now known as the RTL1, is said to have arrived in Australia in January 1996 to conduct tests for its buyer, V/Line Freight, according to Darren’s Gunzel Gallery. This Australian freight operator had ordered the truck in an unusual configuration with no double rear axles, but with full Westinghouse air brakes – in addition to the foot brake. This is according to comments from emdB67, who apparently has first-hand experience of the RTL1.

Both were used when they entered full service in 1998, hauling grain silos on a branch line in Victoria. It was designed to use its flexibility between road and rail to switch between branch lines that were close together but had an inconveniently distant junction. Essentially, it was a light utility locomotive that could be driven wherever it was needed. (It’s the exact opposite of the Bayside Canadian Railway, if that makes sense.) This had an added advantage that allowed the RTL1 to take on a later job, marking the peak of its usage in the summer of 1998.

At the time, the RTL1 was moved to a disused forestry line that had a crippling infrastructure problem. It ran over a bridge over the River Avon that had become too weak to support a regular train. However, the relatively light RTL1, pulling a handful of lightly loaded timber wagons, was still within its limits. And so it was in service for about three months, which lasted four to as many years. 15 trips daily. In January 2000, however, the bridge was reinforced and regular train traffic was able to resume. The RTL1, now useless again, lay idle – and its defects had now also been fully proven.

The RTL1 apparently had problems with severe tyre wear, requiring frequent tyre changes, which limited its operating time. The drive axles of the single-tyred truck did not appear to have good traction on the steel rails, which affected the RTL1’s performance even on shallow gradients. Normal steel-wheeled locomotives do not have this problem, as the frictional properties of steel combined with more weight on smaller contact areas actually produce good traction. The RTL1 just does not seem to have been as good as V/Line Freight had hoped, which is why the RTL1 was never complemented by an RTL2 or RTL3 as was reportedly planned.

However, this was by no means the end of the story for RTL1.

V/Line Freight was bought by Freight Australia, given a new livery and was used for track maintenance where it was documented as moving ballast wagons. (These are used to spread the crushed rocks that form the foundation of many railway tracks.) I found further documentation of it moving flat wagons in 2015 but the trail goes cold from there.

That doesn’t sound like a particularly adventurous life, but overall, using it for nearly two decades on one continent is as colorful a life as auto-cryptids get. Especially for train-truck chimeras, who sometimes die a quick, heartbreaking death like the characters of Shed 17. That’s, er, the Thomas the Tank Engine body horror fan film. Yeah, I probably Do seems like I know about it, and no, I would not recommend watching it.

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