Anyone travelling the highways of South-East Australia will be familiar with the bright green trucks of South Australian outfit, Collins Transport. The growing fleet handles a growing refrigerated transport task between Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.

The company’s trucks are instantly recognisable as an almost completely Kenworth fleet, the majority of which are K200s.

The business was founded by John Collins, and now involves the second generation, with Neil and Craig in the business, alongside Ryan and Brodie from the third generation of the Collins clan. Despite growing fast in recent years the operation has strived to maintain. its ‘family business’ culture and keep true to a family tradition of customer service.

As the demand for refrigerated freight has grown, at the same time as a couple of national fridge specialists have moved out of the sector, regional fleets like Collins have been able to grow fast and become a serious player in the national refrigerated sector.

Collins Adelaide is a crucial link in the freight task, ensuring customers’ expectations are met.

The operation has developed a model based on maintaining strict scheduling and a complex system of shuttle runs where the freight is constantly moving and many of the prime movers are running 24 hours a day.

The process involves a mixture of some shuttle driving, changeovers, straight point to point runs and load consolidation close to the original source of the freight.

Image: Prime Creative Media

This kind of high utilisation of the equipment means the fleet needs a high level of standardisation, so that prime movers can handle a wide variety of the different applications.

By sticking to the Kenworth brand and having cabover prime movers predominate the operation achieves the kind of flexibility required in the pressure cooker which is running a time sensitive refrigerated distribution system.

“As well as customer service we believe at our core ‘Our People are our Business’,” says Carl Hamilton, Collins’ National Workshop Manager.

“We’ve got over 200 trucks with about 150 or so on line-haul, plus there’s another 50 local trucks. There are over 460 trailers in the fleet.

“We do most of our own maintenance within our own workshop. We’ve got our workshop split into two, which is a little bit unusual. Most workshops, do trucks and trailers, but we have got a prime mover workshop here, where these guys only work on prime movers.

“They’re qualified diesel mechanics with Kenworth experience, and they never ever touch a trailer. It’s a 24 hour workshop.”

Carl Hamilton, Collins’ National Workshop Manager. (Image: Prime Creative Media)

The second workshop has trailer mechanics, dedicated to servicing, maintaining and repairing trailers, and then separate to that, there are five refrigeration mechanics, who look after the fridges on the trailers.

The operation also has two fabrication areas. One for chassis and steel repairs, plus rebuilds of trailers, and the other is a fibreglass workshop, Collins does its own fibreglass repairs.

“It’s only when we get snowed under and have too much to do, that will send our equipment out to suppliers and repairers of choice,” says Carl. “Truck wise we send out for warranty and engine rebuilds.”

“Altogether we have about 54 techs working for us, and that includes the fabrication department. At the moment I’ve got about 15 apprentices on the books, one of my diesel apprentices is a young girl, she’s doing really well, Cheyenne.”

Collins have got a workshop in Sydney and in a workshop in Melbourne, but 85 per cent of the maintenance work is handled in Adelaide.

“It’s still hard to find qualified people for the workshop, particularly with the hours that we do,” says Carl. “Fortunately, we don’t lose many people.”