How much coal do you haul today?

Art Robinson: “Today, it’s about 3.5 million tons a year. The way it works out, we’re moving about as much coal in a day as we did in a whole year back in 1946, when I started the company.”

Are you the first in your family to be in the coal business?

“My dad owned part of some coal mines out here, along with a gas station and garage. When I was 14, I started driving truckloads of coal for him.
“Now, my kids are working with me. We don’t own any mines, but we’re still hauling coal.”

Where is the mine?

“It’s about 30 miles from Salina. The first 16 miles is pretty good highway, then there’s 10 miles or so back to the mine over some very sharp turns and very steep grades.
“We go from about 5,000 feet elevation here in Salina, hit the summit at a little under 9,000, then drop down to 7,000 to the mine itself. Then, once we’re fully loaded, we have to come back up over the summit again.”

How steep are those grades?

“Some of them are nine percent. With almost 130,000 pounds gross, it takes a lot of power to get back out of there.”

Is it a good road?

“Pretty good. It’s paved all the way, and with the way we and the coal company take care of it, we can usually get through, even during the winter.

“It’s pretty wild country. Believe it or not, we spend about $100 thousand a year repairing damage to our trucks from collisions with deer.”

Where do you take the coal?

“Some goes to a dump yard near Levan. From there, it gets loaded onto rail cars. We also deliver to power plants in Emory County and to the Kennecott Copper mine up near Salt Lake.

“One way or another, most of it goes into making electricity.”

How much would be in a truckload?

“We load 43 tons into each truck. It only takes about 45 seconds to put all of that into the truck. They have big overhead hoppers that dump directly into our
trailers. So we load about one ton per second.

“The mine loads 900 truckloads every 24 hours. Work that out, and it’s only about a minute-and-a-half per truckload. Since it takes about half that time to load the trailer, you can see that there’s a lot of trucks coming out of that mine.

“They’ve got computerized sensors that tell the mine’s computers who we are, what truck number it is, when we loaded, and so on.”

How do you unload?

“All our trailers have hopper bottoms. When we get someplace like Levan, we dump out the bottom of the trailer, either directly onto the pile or into a ‘grizzly.’

What’s a “grizzly”? “It’s a big steel grate. We drive onto it and dump through it into a big hole in the ground. A conveyor lifts it out so they can load it onto the rail cars.” What kind of equipment are you using? Kim Robinson: “We have about 60 Kenworth tractors with heavy duty transmissions and rear ends – and big Caterpillar engines. “In fact, with all the coal hauling that goes on, we hear there are more Caterpillar engines right here in Sevier Country than in the whole rest of the state.”

And your trailers?

“We run Rocky Mountain doubles, with Beall trailers. In fact, Dad worked really closely with Beall in developing these.”

What kind of input did you give Beall?

Art Robinson: “We tried steel trailers at one point, but we had a lot of problems with cracking and rust. They use a lot of salt on the mine road in the winter, and after only about three years, our steel trailers were rusted out.

“With these new aluminum trailers, we’re getting upwards of 10 years of service. They’re more expensive, but they last a lot longer and there’s less upkeep than with steel.”

vehicles: 60 Kenworth tractors with Caterpillar engines, heavy duty transmissions and rear ends60 Rocky Mountain double Beall hopper-bottom trailers; overall vehicle length: 100 feet

How large are your rigs?

Kim Robinson: “With the tractor and the two trailers, we’re at about 100 feet overall length. Gross weight is about 129,500 pounds, with 86,000 of that being coal.

How many tires on one of these trucks?

“We’ve got 10 axles. The front trailer has three and the rear has four. On most of our trailers, we’re using wide base tires on the front axles of the front trailer and duals on the rear. So, there are 24 tires on the trailers and 10 on the tractor.”

What do the wide base tires do for you?

“We save some weight, which helps us increase payload, but we were also having problems with duals in those positions – on the front axles of the first trailer.
“The mine road has a lot of sharp curves, and we were actually breaking wheels from the forces we encountered in the turns. When we went to the wide base tires with the big aluminum wheels, we found they could stand up to the stress a lot better.”

What kind of mileage are you getting from tires?

Art Robinson: “We get about 85,000 to 90,000 miles out of our steer tires and about 60,000 to 65,000 out of our drives. That’s pretty good for the kind of work we do, with the heavy loads, steep grades and sharp turns on the road.” What tires are you using? “We put Bridgestone R293 on steers and M711 on drives. We’ve tried just about every tire there is, and those are doing the best for us. “We’ve had a lot of trouble with traction with other tires, but the M711 gives us better traction than anything else.”

And the wide base tires?

“Those are Bridgestones too, the M844F.” You must go through a lot of tires.

“I buy new Bridgestones by the hundreds. We get container loads delivered all the time. We’ve got a special warehouse just to store tires.”

Are you retreading?

“We use Bandag retreads. In my opinion, they’ll outwear any cap there is. We can get about five caps per casing and we’ll use retreads for about five years before we scrap them out.”

How many rigs are you running?

“We have 60 trucks. I’ve got one son who has five of his own, and we use maybe 10 owner operators. So we’re running about 70 or 75 all together.”

And you run 24 hours a day?

“The mine loads five days a week, 24 hours a day, but a lot of times, we’re running six days, especially when we’re delivering to Kennecott.

We’ll load up trucks on Friday and park them overnight in our own yard, then take them on up to Kennecott on Saturday or Sunday.”

How many miles do you put on your vehicles in a year?

“Running three shifts a day, it’s no problem for us to run 250,000 to 300,000 miles per truck every year.

“That’s made us really attractive for equipment manufacturers who want to do tests.

We’ve tested tires, transmissions, rear ends – all kinds of things, because we’ll put hard miles on them, very fast.”

Do you do your own maintenance and repair?

Kim Robinson: “Most of it. We don’t do any engine work, because that’s usually covered under warranty, but we take care of our own tire work, rear ends, transmission swaps, alignments and so on.

“Every truck is in our shop at least once a week for some kind of maintenance.”

How many drivers do you have?

“We’ve got about 110 drivers right now.”

Is it hard finding drivers for this kind of work?

“A little bit. This is not like regular hauling, and even though we go over the same roads every day, it’s not the same kind of driving people are used to.

“It’s not unusual for us to get a driver who’s been what I might call a ‘flatlander,’ whose only previous job has been running regular trucks back east.

“Sometimes, he’ll make only a couple of runs on that steep mountain road we drive – with that huge load behind him – and decide this kind of hauling isn’t for him.”

How are you doing with driver retention?

“No problem there.

For drivers who like this kind of work, it’s perfect, because they have a regular schedule and get home every day.

It’s just like having a regular job.”

How much longer will the coal last?

Art Robinson: “It depends on the price of coal. But right now, the mine says it’s got at least 30 years more coal to bring out. So we’ll be at it a while longer.