With major infrastructure works getting underway across the country, there has been an unprecedented need for road rail conversion vehicles.
Needing to be highly flexible and adaptable, this niche transport market has been taken over by Aries Rail and their Aries Hyrail vehicles.
The vehicles come in a variety of shapes and forms: from utes and 4WDs through to light-duty maintenance trucks, all the way to larger crane trucks, tippers, tilt-trays and vacuum pumpers.
Aries Rail engineering director Phil Gooch says current demand for their product is through the roof.
“A lot of the big tunnelling projects, particularly in Sydney and Brisbane, are desperate for vehicles that don’t exist; there’s just not a surplus of road rail trucks in the hire market in Australia.
“We know the quality of our product and technical compliance speaks for itself compared to what’s already out there in the hire space.
“For example, many of our clients need the flexibility to be able to pick up tools and equipment from a yard, drive from there to the rail, jump on the railway into the tunnel and get to where that work needs to happen,” he says.
“We’ve responded to that demand by building a hire fleet of Isuzu trucks that can go on road and any rail network in Australia and be compliant with any standard across the network.”
Within three years, Aries Rail’s fleet is now sitting at over 30 assets, a large proportion of these are Isuzu trucks converted for road and rail use.
The majority are Isuzu FVR, FVZ, FVY and FXY medium-duty trucks, modified with a strengthened chassis and rail suspension system, amongst other fittings.
Currently, Aries Rail is in the process of building four Isuzu NPS 75-155 4×4 narrow gauge maintenance vehicles and a new FSR 140-260—to name just a few—for transport networks from Western Australia over to the east coast of Queensland.