Auburn Hino Side Loader

I still recall that Monday morning I did my very first shift at Auburn Council, I jumped in ACCO p41 and finally lived out a dream. One thing I didn’t expect during that second half of 2013 was the delivery of a couple brand new collection trucks, being side loader 1296 and rear loader 1297. Whilst I never had anything to do with that Hino rear loader, I spent considerable time steering and operating this Hino FM side arm with the MJ GenV. Initially I was excited to have a go at this fresh and unfamiliar truck, I was actually completely lost when I got in the cab for the first time, but eventually I figured it out and we got along quite fine. However, after a while I got a bit over it and felt like the odd one out in the waste services crew. I really missed driving the ACCOs my colleagues were paired up with - only when one of them was on holidays would I get into those 2008 Ivecos, which wasn’t often enough!
The council was trialling trucks for the next fleet purchase and these couple Hinos came around as a result of that, but I learnt the bloke in charge of equipment procurement was also on a mission to save dollars and went down the cheapest path available at the time. In the end the council took the body off this Hino and remounted it onto a new ACCO cab chassis, which still exists today as original unit T1 or T2 under the URM Cumberland contract. There were some problems experienced with this Hino, in particular faults with the regen burn off, the very poor acceleration power during driving was also not favoured. It wasn’t all bad but, it was comfy and quiet in the cab, everything about the interior was good except the push button maxi brake, the exhaust brake and Telma retarder were epic at slowing the truck too. 1296 got the job done, was just different from the rest of the group, in which case the others wanted nothing to do with it.
This side loader also came with the Extend-A-Slide feature which was still relatively new to the market, I exaggerated the stopping distance in this video to properly demo it. The large convex mirror threw me off and was a tricky thing to get used to for emptying bins, I never considered angling the flat rectangular mirror down for picking up! I do give an overkilled shot of the mirror in this video to see what the perspective was, it showed a great wide angle anyway. I had to include a cab view as usual, as you’ll hear it’s very quiet in there, apart from the 80s classic tune pumping on the radio haha The council branding and body livery was very different on the two Hinos as well, putting recycling education down as the suitable theme, but I’m sure it was a lost cause. Somebody videoed me collecting green waste with 1296 way back, but that footage has since been deleted, so all we have to see of this ex-Auburn rig now is right here, hope you enjoy!

[@rockinghamgarbo]

Nice to see another video of a truck collecting, was starting to expect the next few uploads to be long form videos of recycling plants and tips etc. good stuff

[@Brad-yf3zu]

Quiet truck, always wandered why the former auburn council didn’t use larger 25m or 29m on recycling. It may have been the only Sydney council with an MJ fleet that didn’t use the larger bodies on recycling. The extend a slide feature looks handy, wander if spak will follow.

[@AussieGarbo]

The different trucks/drivers in the fleet would change runs and waste streams every so often, I guess having 22m as standard kept it the right size for all round operations. Plus one week was green waste and the next week was recycling, so bigger 25-29m bodies would've been overkill for this area doing greens. You could still pack about 550-600 bins of Auburn recycle in a load and you'd get plenty of greens on too, so you weren't at a disadvantage with capacity. Strathfield has also been running these smaller body MJs on recycle and greens for a number of years... Camden used to go with the small size for a while too, I reckon that truck #82 I videoed was their first high capacity model from around 08/09. I don't think SPAK will do a telescopic slide like this, they don't need to as their reach is already great. I've been satisfied with the standard slide beam length majority of the time, only here and there in cul-de-sacs where you might get caught out and wish you had more extension to play with, otherwise not really necessary in my eyes.

[@Quirindigarbologist]

Nice video Mitch do you know if this hino was built around some time as the former Gunnedah Hino mini or is this newer cause I think Gunnedahs was 2012-2013 early

[@AussieGarbo]

This Auburn truck was built afterwards, I videoed that Gunnedah side loader in January 2012 and it was a bit over a month old at the time.