Bitu-Mill has recently taken delivery of four new Trout River Live Bottom trailers from MaxiTRANS, which have been deployed throughout its national fleet, complementing the company’s road maintenance operations with enhanced safety and reliability.
Part of BildGroup, Bitu-Mill is a road profiling company which specialises in some of Australia’s biggest road infrastructure projects. With divisions in Brisbane, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, it works with councils and government departments, such as VicRoads, to deliver these upgrades.
Establishing in 1979, Bitu-Mill has since locked onto the Trout River product. It was in 2018 when the fleet purchased its first Trout River, and today has trailers deployed in every state it operates in. There are now a total of 16 units, five of which are positioned in Victoria, with the rest spread evenly across the other states.
The latest additions to the Bitu-Mill fleet are four new tri-axle Trout River Live Bottom trailers, which Victorian Profiling State Manager, Brendan Dixon, says the recently purchased units were put straight to work.
“We’re very impressed with them so far,” he says. “They perform quite well. We don’t have any issues with break downs halfway through operation or where we need to replace the belts at the drop of a hat, or anything like that. They’ve been really reliable.”
“Queensland holds the largest fleet of our Trout River units,” says Fleet Manager, Karyna Borg.
The new trailers will cart asphalt to their road projects, and on the flip side, will take away material that has been profiled up with Bitu-Mill’s machines.
“The material goes in through the machine, up a big conveyor belt and then gets spat out the back,” Brendan says. “Then, the material gets taken away for recycling. We reuse the material that comes off the roads 95 per cent of the time.”
Since purchasing their first Trout River, their accessibility, Brendan says, has played a key part in keeping them around.
“They had a good name in the industry at the time,” he says. “We had a bit of a look around and found that they were user-friendly for our drivers. They weren’t overly complicated on how to use them or anything like that. They were pretty good with access to different parts of daily maintenance. It just made sense for us to get something that wasn’t overly complicated, had a good reputation, easy to use, and it’s worked really well so far.”
“With the way the industry was heading at that time around safety, that was a big thing for us as well,” Karyna adds. “What we’ve tried to do within our businesses is eliminate body tipping. The hoists aren’t going up now like they’ve predominantly done, now it’s just all flat. So, there’s no risk of the truck tipping over, there’s no risk of striking live powerlines above your head or anything like that. There’s a lot of positives with eliminating risks on job sites with these trailers.”
In addition, a lack of down time works well with what Bitu-Mill is trying to achieve, Karyna says.
“The guys like them because they’re pretty easy to operate,” she says. “We don’t have to give a day training course on how to operate them. Generally, it’s just an hour or so and they get the hang of it, and we don’t have to worry about tipping on uneven ground. That saved us a lot of time in that area.”
For Karyna, the whole experience of dealing with MaxiTRANS has been very positive.
“For me, in my department and with what I do, communication is a big thing,” she says. “We deal with MaxiTRANS in Victoria and they’ve been outstanding when it comes to communication.”
For Brendan, it’s the reliability of the Trout River product.
“They’re very reliable trailers,” he says. “The last thing I need is a truck full of asphalt, they go to get it out onsite, and the trailer doesn’t work. It’s big money when you’re talking a full load of asphalt, and then it sets in the trailer and it’s all sorts of dramas. We’ve never had that problem with this product, so reliability is a really big one for my part of the business.”
