Another day older and deeper in debt

Inspired by this post over at Ranger Tom's, I will tell you about a little trip I took in a truck back when I was wet behind the ears (a phrase that I don't understand).

An older friend of mine in the Latrobe Valley had a Scania semi-trailer and was doing a trip to Sydney. I went along for the ride. The trip up and back was uneventful, except for the guy who blew his horn at us as we were driving off from a set of traffic lights. We pulled up in the middle of the intersection and, taking an eighteen inch shifter, the driver began wandering to the back of the trailer, checking his tyres as he went. When he got to the rear of the trailer he put the shifter over his shoulder and went to the car behind us.

"It sounds like there's something wrong with your horn button, want me to fix it for you?"

Coming back into Traralgon we were running low on fuel. There is a railway line which runs parallel with the highway. We had to cross under a viaduct to get to a fuel depot. The intersection was on a slight curve on the highway and was always busy. Coming up to the intersection the intersection, the engine cut out. Twenty two tons of steel on the back, no power steering and only one application of the brakes (Trucks have air brakes. The air releases the brakes. With the engine stopped, the compressor wasn't compressing so the brakes wouldn't release once applied.)

The turning light was green, so we were OK to go through. We couldn't go straight ahead because there were vehicles turning from the opposite direction. Hitting the brakes was not an option because of the inherent risk of lockups and lost control. We shot under the viaduct, me working one side of the steering wheel, the driver working the other. We ran a bit wide on the exit and collected a roadsign on the centre divider. We managed to roll up to the fuel depot, hitting the brakes at just the right time to pull up right next to the pumps. Fuelled up, went to bleed the injectors - after dealing with an (understandably) irate motorist, nothing. Couldn't bleed the fuel system. Turns out that we hadn't run out of fuel at all, the injector pump drive had sheared.