Spring Fire District Chief Chris vonWiesenthal, firefighter Emmanuel Barrera and Training Captain Greg Monroe, contributed to this story with key information and photos.

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A is a B-doubleB is a B-tripleC is a double road train. A "Pocket road train" is similar, but with shorter trailers and dolly drawbarD is an AB-tripleE is a BAB QuadF is an ABB QuadG is triple road trainH is a 2AB QuadI is a Powertrain

With city and town limit restrictions governing truck and trailer lengths (for good reasons - they don’t brake or turn like more agile local trucks!), you may not have seen some of these combinations. Unless of course, you’ve ventured beyond the freeways or come across one as driver and train grumble to life, starting their journey at at dawn or dusk at far edge of town from an industrial estate.

The Powertrain or a "Body and six" represents the represents the largest road trains operating in Australia and the world. These machines operate at the Granites gold mine in the western Northern Territory, and are used in place of 200t dump trucks, because of the distances involved on the haul run. A 600 hp (450 kW) 19 L (1,200 cu in) Cummins engine powers the prime mover, whilst a 400 hp (300 kW) Cummins engine is installed in the rear trailer of the B-double, driving through an automatic transmission, giving a total of 1,000 hp (750 kW). Weights of 460 t (453 long tons; 507 short tons) are achieved with ore loading in side-tipper bodies on a 100 km (62 mi) round trip. As these trucks operate on private property, they’re not subject to public road weight and length rulings.

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Spring firefighters carry different sizes of hose for different purposes. “A typical attack line to fight a house fire is 1 3/4 inches in diameter,” added vonWiesenthal. “The largest hose Spring Fire carries is not for fighting fires but for quickly suctioning water out of the portable tank. Those hoses are six inches in diameter, over three times the size of the standard attack hose.”

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Depending on the size of the fire, this operation may involve multiple tenders making dozens of trips to carry water to the scene. The fire engine driver is responsible for seeing that this water delivery process moves as quickly as possible.

Australia is a vast and magnificent country with some rural and remote communities thousands of kilometres from the next town.

The bottom line is you need water to put out a fire. When hydrants are not easily available, firefighters need to learn creative ways to get water onto the fire as quickly as possible in order to save lives and property.

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“Spring Fire has two tankers that can carry 3200 gallons of water apiece,” added VonWiesenthal. “They are equipped to get water from neighboring hydrant systems, or other large bodies of water such as streams, rivers or lakes.”

If you have had the chance to see a road train, you’d know: road trains are a truly memorable sight: mightily stretching on, seemingly for days, mechanical behemoths delivering essential supplies, livestock and infrastructure.

That means hooking up to a fire hydrant within a couple of minutes or needing a tanker or additional engine to keep water flowing onto the flames.

In areas with weak or even no fire hydrants close by, firefighters have to bring even more water. Using Water Tenders — fire trucks also referred to as tankers that are designed to carry large amounts of water — and portable folding water tanks, firefighters can shuttle water to the tanks to support firefighting operations. This process is called “Drafting,” and with the use of multiple Water Tenders, this system can sustain large volumes of water flow for extended periods.

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Harris County Emergency Services District No. 7 Spring Fire Department 656 East Louetta Road Spring, Texas 77373 281.355.1266

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Because fires rarely happen next to a hydrant, drafting water and running hose lines are two of the most basic firefighting skills, making firefighters experts at moving water.

Hose lines for Fire Attack are the responsibility of the first engine to arrive. Otherwise known as the “attack pumper,” the first engine on the scene takes the responsibility of flowing the water onto the fire. “In a large fire, such as the Motel 6 fire, different engines will position on different sides of the fire. All may serve different roles in a large, coordinated effort to extinguish a multiple alarm blaze.”

Drafting is the process where water is sucked in through pumps built into the tender, which then brings the water back to the fire scene where it is dumped into the portable folding tanks.

“Our biggest enemy is always time,” said Spring Fire District Chief Chris vonWiesenthal. “Seconds count throughout the whole response event. From the time it takes to report the fire to 9-1-1, to the time it takes to arrive on the scene, as well as the time it takes to extinguish the fire, the clock is always working against us.”

While rail systems try their best to connect shipping ports with distribution hubs, it’s trucking that connects our cities and towns. With efficient road transport the goal, road trains have famously evolved in Australia to provide some truly spectacular configurations.