Gold Rush

As a young man, Murray Leahy was content to travel the country, picking up driving jobs and enjoying the surrounds of where he found himself. He had been born into a family earthmoving company.

The immediate lessons were that the concerns of business don’t await the leisure of youth.

It wasn’t, however, until he was later confronted with an ultimatum that set forth Murray in a new direction, one he would eventually helm even if he didn’t know it at the time.

A brief sketch of what that destination looks like now would include a payroll of 1300 staff, 200 contractors, five operational headquarters and 170 roadtrains.

Not bad for a guy who is a boilermaker by trade and started off with just one truck — his father’s.

“I began the business in 2002 as a one truck operation,” he recalls. “My parents had an earthmoving business with a truck that I was driving, and it really originated there.”

It was soon apparent that he had developed his own ideas about running a business while away from the family that now decidedly differed.

“It was different to the way dad wanted to go about it so about eight months in he looked at me one day and said, ‘you’re either buying this asset or leaving, you make up your mind what you want to do,’” Murray recalls. “And that’s how MLG came to fruition.”

MLG has three main business arms all connected to mining. There is the large bulk haulage division along with an open pit mining division and a crushing and screening division.

Just as a large part of the business is associated with servicing gold mining, it also covers iron ore and base metals undertaking satellite pit to processing plant feeds.

“Our business will pick up the ore from the active mine and in some cases, we are mining that within our mining division outside of our trucks,” says Murray.

“We’ll pick it up and we will transport it through to the processing facility and feed it into either our crushing plant or their processing facility for them to extract the gold.”

Key to this business segment is MLG’s off-road haulage division where a combination of Mack and Kenworth prime movers are designed and built for 260-tonne payload triple roadtrain configuration across approximately ten different operations throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

MLG frequently revisits the trucks it wants to bring into the fold in the lead up to its annual fleet reinvestment. Historically, it has operated a series of Kenworth C510s with a Cummins QSK 19-Series engine.

That prompted Murray to look at what Kenworth had done to the C509 platform with the integrated cab design and also the Eaton Autoshift marrying with the Cummins engine.

“We saw the platform presented really well,” he says.

“Having run a lot of Kenworths over a period of time we thought they would be a very good fit for particularly our high ambient temperature jobs, places like the Tanami Desert and the northern goldfields in the Pilbara where we are working these trucks very hard at the upper end of their GCM in a very heavy duty cycle.”

About a dozen new Kenworth C509s have recently been purchased, separated in two ratings capacities of 360-tonne and 240-tonnes. Typically, the Kenworth C509s will be operating 24/7.

“We work towards achieving about 6500 hours a year out of our off-road haulage fleet,” explains Murray.

“So, they will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with about the only thing that interrupts them being wet weather.”

Over the last 18 months uptake in orders for the Kenworth C509, particularly from Western Australia, have been noticeable at PACCAR Australia’s manufacturing plant in Bayswater. Murray proposes a theory.

“I can talk to that in great detail,” he says. “Uptake of the C509 from a Western Australian perspective has really been driven by the fact that both on-road and off-road we’ve seen a big uptick in GCM capacity over the last five years.”

The transition of super quad and ultra quad trucks coming onto the road network in Western Australia have helped pave the way according to Murray.

“But we’ve also seen our off-road GCM increase,” he says.

“Ten years ago, you would run 150 tonne payload off-road at maximum GCM of 210 tonnes. Now we’ve seen that GCM get to 360 tonnes off-road and 260 tonnes off-road and the C509 platform with its straight chassis rails versus the tapered front end chassis rails of the Kenworth T909 presents a really strong chassis ladder that stands the test of time.”

That design also allows for a larger radiator assembly, which means the cooling capacity of the truck is higher.

“The C509 also offers the slipper spring front end married to the nine-tonne Meritor steer-axle that allows for a good turning circle,” adds Murray.

“It’s a very robust front suspension. A slipper spring versus a shackle top spring on a torsion bar assembly and that straight chassis rail is bloody bulletproof and on top of that you’ve got this great big radiator that can keep the engine cool with 300-odd tonne swinging off its back end.”

These latest Kenworths are powered by a 620hp Cummins X15 paired with an Eaton Autoshift. The AutoShift transmission is an advanced shift-by-wire system consisting of an Eaton Fuller heavy-duty box communicating with an electronic engine utilising the SAE-J1939 protocol for precise control of the engine and transmission functions.

This drivetrain is run in concert with a SISU hub reduction tri-drive axle group. The new C509s have been purchased for both additional business and as part of ongoing fleet renewal.

Two new projects have recently commenced including a three-year agreement with Westgold transferring Run of Mine ore from its various mines to its Higginsville and Lakewood processing facilities.

While approximately 60 per cent of the fleet is considered on-road, dirt tracks into mine sites account for a significant percentage of that category. Onroad, by that measure, is a combination of bitumen or gravel and operating on gazetted roads.

The fleet has evolved over time to be evenly split between Kenworth and Mack brands.

“With the advent of the Mack MP10 and mDRIVE and the issues associated with the early stage EGR Cummins engines we had a slant towards purchasing more Macks for a period of time,” says Murray.

“We will dovetail the operations of the business to a particular brand and what I mean by that is where we find the Mack fits better, we’ll run that complete site all Mack and then on the sites where the Kenworth product works better, and this can be for a multitude of reasons like the turning load requirements, the traffic interaction and the vision required, those kind of things will then guide whether we are focused predominantly on Mack or on Kenworth for that particular operation.”

Last year, to some fanfare, MLG took delivery of the 80,000th Mack prime mover produced in Australia. It was the last unit in a 13 truck order from Mack. Since then, the 685hp Titan has successfully been working as a triple roadtrain south of Kalgoorlie on a private road network.

“That’s been going really well,” says Murray. “It’s not a dissimilar set-up to the 509, other than it has a MP10 engine and an mDRIVE versus the X15 and the Eaton Autoshift.”

The decision-making process that goes into fleet revitalisation is in depth. It must factor operational hours and individual task requirements. Where are they working? What is the support capacity in terms of parts, access to OEM support in the specific region the truck is working? The job conditions?

“Is it a dirt road? Is it a well maintained dirt road? Is it a bitumen road? Are there any gradient related items that are an issue or a potential issue that you need to deal with and all that information then feeds into what we do for decision-making around the product that we purchase and the other thing that comes with that is the lead time, too,” says Murray.

“Over the last three or four years lead time has become quite challenging. It’s only in recent times has it become far better. Twelve months ago, you were looking at 12, 14, 15 months for a delivery of a prime mover. So, you were a little bit beholden sometimes to making a square peg fit in a round hole but fortunately we’ve transitioned back to a period where that lead time is materially shorter than what it was, historically. We’re no longer in the situation of having that really steer what assets we put where.”

Operations stretch from Esperance in the south of WA right through to the Kimberley. MLG is very active in the Tanami Desert, the Northern Territory and the gulf regions as well.

The operational spread covers 35 full time sites and includes depots in Esperance, Kalgoorlie, Leonora and Perth. Murray is based in Kalgoorlie but spends about 50 per cent of his time in Perth.

The business has invested heavily in technology especially around fatigue management, asset tracking and asset utilisation according to Murray.

“We’ve got a large Microsoft Power BI oversight across what’s happening both individually at an asset level but also operationally at a site, group and wider business level,” he says.

“As a business, we’re a relatively young and consistently growing business. One that has this thirst and desire for knowledge which underpins a desire to drive sustained growth through informed decision making.”

The business is consistently working on initiatives — initiatives built around how it might better create the best environment for its team of people to work within.

Murray is also concerned about ensuring the people at MLG have capacity to hold themselves and their work colleagues to account in ensuring they deliver on the business’ expectation of service but also on what is required of it for customers.

“We’re a business that is very focused on making sure we hold ourselves to account and measure ourselves very accurately to be able to deliver on what our customers are looking to try and achieve but ultimately one that also allows our workforce to be material contributors to our success,” he says.

“We are very much a people-focused business that considers our people our most valuable asset. When you have an empowered team that are driven to achieve at a high level all pulling together in the same direction great things can be achieved and that is what MLG is all about.”