What’s with those ultra-thin shipment trucks you see on the highways? :eek: What do they ship, how long have they been used, what’s the purpose (I assume easier storage), etc.
Gotta cite (or a photo, rather)? I’m not sure what you’re asking about and I’m having trouble visualizing it.
I don’t know what to search for in google- ‘thin shipment truck’ and ‘thin truck’ doesn’t bring it up- it looks like a shipment truck, a mac truck like a trucker drives, but it’s really thin, like a
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and has a company name on it like a normal shipment truck.
I’m still not visualizing this. Is it compressed laterally, from side-to-side, or is it compressed front-to-back? Are we talking about the actual tractor being thin or the bed?
I too don’t know exactly what the OP is talking about. Here are some thoughts in that direction though …
There are trailers that are very thin, little more than a set of wheels at the back connected to the front end by a long thin I-beam or pipe. They’re intended to carry large things like pipes or I-beams that are strong in their own right.
In fact, some such trailers are simply an 8-wheeled dolly with brakes and wiring attached and a mounting cradle on top. There’s a similar cradle that sits on the tractor’s fifth wheel (ie trailer connection point). The cargo of pipe or I-beam is then bolted or strapped to the two cradles, thereby forming the entire structure of the trailer. The light wiring & brake lines are then strung along the underside of the cargo from the aft dolly to reach their connections on the tractor.
Using the cargo as the the trailer saves weight & cost, and makes transporting heavier cargo possible w/o exceeding the max allowable weight for the highway.
As to tractors, there are a few that have a narrow cab with only 1 seat for a driver & no space for a passenger. These were more common in the 1950s and 1960s. Usually they’re short-haul local trucks with the tractor & cargo bed behind a single unit, not a detachable trailer. But the overall width of the vehicle is the normal size, only the cab interior is narrow.
You sometimes see those as used by steel fabricators, where the cab is on the left, letting the flatbed extend all the way from the front bumper to the back bumper over the right 1/3rd of the width of the vehicle. The left 2/3rds of the cargo bed ends just behind the narrow cab, like a typical one-peice flatbed truck. This lets them carry longer cargo with a truck of a given wheelbase, and wheelbase is often the basis for licesne plate fees (which can be monstrous on a commercial vehicle), or even for driver’s license requirements.
Thanks to an e-mail from another Doper, I think I may have what you’re looking for, andrew. Is this what you’re talking about?
Maybe this ugly thing?
That’s the first thing I thought of when reading the OP. It’s a mobile billboard, not transporting anything. I think they make baby environmentalists cry.
They’re called “street blimps” around here. A few of the ones in jayjay’s link (like the Sprint truck) looked like they could transport things; the ones I’ve seen just have a narrow structure on the back, with no noticeable doors.
Yes, that is what I saw… thanks jayjay.
Holy crap! :eek: How long have these things existed?
At least since whenever Showgirls hit the theatres—I remember as I was leaving high school one day, a billboard truck (replete with giant Showgirls poster) went through the parking lot, blocking some of the buses from immediately exiting in the process. 