John Atkinson recently raised funds for a cancer care charity near the town of Clifton, Australia, by setting a world record with his Mack Titan heavy-hauling tractor, an 8×6 with three drive axles. Atkinson wanted to set a new Guinness World Record for pulling the longest road train ever assembled with a single prime mover. The 70-year-old, who drove trucks for 50 years, had set the previous record, so the job wasn’t new to him: It was just harder than last time.
The stories that circulated after his last endeavor brought a crowd of 8,000 people to the new site. The train had 113 loaded trailers, giving an overall length of nearly a mile and a gross weight of some 2.87 million pounds. Atkinson had to start the load roughly 100 times greater than his tractor’s from a stop and pull it 328 feet. In spite of soaring temperatures in the waning Australian summer, the truck was up to the job. Atkinson slipped it into gear, got the load moving and broke his own record.
Atkinson’s spec’s were:
