No need to apologise, 'twas music to the ears.
Gâday Buzzer, Ian Cootes was amongst the top five of the most highly respected Australian fleets.
Cootes specialised in fuel transport, it was a tidy, well maintained and efficient fleet until it was bought by an investment consortium who promptly screwed the drivers over and slashed maintenance.
It turned into a total ship show, culminating in a major crash in Sydney, due to a brake failure.
Thatâs what happens when accountants take the reins from competent people, as Boeing are suddenly finding out.
You have mail.
Was that an air starter I heard? Never heard one on anything other than Buntineâs Macks and always wondered why they werenât universally used.
No worries about flat batteries or soft tyres and nowhere to pump them up. 
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Air starters are available for any engine.
Theyâre not as common as they used to be, but are as you said, handy when you find yourself with a flat battery, three hours from civilization.
Theyâre a ton of fun to use when an old bloke is doddering past, or a dog is about to c ock its leg on ya drive. 
But my question is WHY? They are are the best things since sliced bread, not that I eat that stuff, but what are the downsides? If any.
Too hard to sneak around. Neighbours seem to get upset about the noise and the vast majority of trucks spend some time in populated areas.
I expect they also fall foul of noise level legislation.
The Bruce Highway, part of Highway 1, will be closed for most of the day.
Be out of air before a Gardner gave its first kick on a cold morning!
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Then you start on the tyres. 
Just woke up, you beat me to it, my question to @colinwallace1 was going to be, âHow many tyres do you have, full of the stuffâ? 
Then when youâve got the engine started you reverse the pressure and blow the air you âborrowedâ back into the tyres.
I had 58 tyres (I think 
) on my road train, if the engine didnât start by the time I got to those, there was something wrong with the engine.
From memory, an 11Rx22.5 gave three tries. The most common road train has 62 wheels on the road with six spares, using all my fingers and toes, I make that 204 tries, more than enough to coax the coldest Gardiner from its slumber.
Do you remember the trick with a pencil, if the battery was dead, Spardo?
Or you forgot to push the stop cable in 
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Youâre talking about B-trains with tri-axles, not invented in my day. 
No, never had a flat battery, tell me about it. 
BTW, forgot to mention, the long air line we were supplied with could also blow diesel from one tank to the other. Not sure why that was necessary but I was shown it once. 
No mate, Iâm thinking bogie drive prime mover, triple tri trailers and a couple of bogie dollies, with two spares per trailer.
On a Mack with air start, there was only a small car size battery, it didnât take muchfor it to go flat. The starter solenoid was on the left side of the firewall. A pen, pencil or anything similarly sized would fit into the solenoid, engaging the contacts, if the battery was flat.
Trailers venturing into the boonies often have belly tanks.
Fuel is transferred by pressuring the tank.
I worked out (had to count twice) 2 axle tractor, tandem semi + 2 dogs, also tandems, 2 dollies with tandems and 4 spares per trailer.
I might have been unusual in having so many spares as the first trip most were rag tyres. Even then I used them all up and had to borrow from the next one passing. After I had got rid of those tyres though it was easier from then on.
But nobody told me about the battery trick, but it was only needed in the dark though.
The only diesel carried was in 2 tanks on the tractor, for some reason the âspareâ didnât feed the âmainâ so we pressurised it with the airline. All the tanks on the trailers carried water.
I know itâs not Australia and itâs definitely not a Leyland .An AEC Mandator V8 in NZ .Note the âhigh datumâ cab as they were called , i think it was the last throw of the dice to cure the overheating. They should have spent more developing the AV760 , then the TL12 a very reliable motor but probably not suitable for Australia
