This Double-Ended Truck Has a Very Important Job To Do

Things are always more fun when they’re double-ended, right? That’s true of all sorts of common household items, but it’s especially true of big vehicles. Imagine my excitement, then, when I came across this beautiful double-ended Mercedes-Benz in my home town of Adelaide, Australia.

If you ever visit, you’ll find that Adelaide is home to a very special transportation network. It’s called the O-Bahn: A concrete track designed solely for buses, intended to whoosh them from the north-eastern suburbs directly into the central business district. We’ve previously covered the O-Bahn in detail, because buses running on guided tracks is just silly obscure fun. As it turns out, though, this beautiful piece of infrastructure has even more automotive gems to mine.

You see, the problem with having a track just for buses is that sometimes those buses break down. When that happens, you need a special vehicle to recover them. That’s where Dumbo comes in.

Dumbo is a bit of a local hero in Adelaide. Officially known as the “Busway Recovery Vehicle,” it was built by Daimler-Benz, which also supplied the very first buses for the O-Bahn. As you might imagine, there aren’t a lot of double-ended trucks just ready to go off the shelf. Instead, it was built as a specialist recovery vehicle from the ground up.

The double-ended configuration was an absolute necessity to recover buses stranded on the tracks. Since the O-Bahn uses raised flanges on the concrete track for guidance, there’s no way to get on or off the track except at the ends. If a single-ended recovery vehicle was used, the driver would have to reverse all the way up to a stricken bus until they could hook it up and drive away normally. Instead, the double-ended setup lets them drive normally to the stranded vehicle, attach the tow coupling, and then jump into the other cab to drag it away.

Dumbo doing its thing.

These images show how the guide wheels are connected to the steering tie rod. 

As you might imagine, this beast is remarkably well equipped. It has four-wheel-drive, and has guide wheels for use on the concrete busway on both ends.  It also has front and rear differential locks, as well as one for the transfer case. While the truck is unlikely to suffer for grip on the concrete busway surface, towing a stranded bus is no mean feat and rain could certainly complicate issues. It’s better to have the provision and not need it, then need it and not have it.

Dumbo tows using a dedicated coupling built into every O-Bahn bus. However, it’s not typically used to recover civilian vehicles that get stranded on the busway by accident. Instead, these vehicles are usually rescued by conventional flatbed tow vehicles that must drive very carefully on the O-Bahn tracks without mechanical guidance.

The Busway Recovery Vehicle needs to be able to travel at speed in either direction. A popular but unconfirmed rumor is that it uses a transmission from a tank to drive at equal speeds both ways. 

A rare video of Dumbo rescuing a stranded bus from the O-Bahn, shot in 2018. 

Specialist tow couplings are built into every O-bahn bus. 

Hooking up for a recovery does not take long, as seen in the video above. Speedy recoveries are particularly critical given that the O-Bahn serves as a major transportation link, carrying over 31,000 people a day.

The bus is not solely used on the O-Bahn busway. It can also be used to recover normal buses on Adelaide’s surface streets, too. This can be seen in the images below provided by Wongm’s Rail Gallery, which depict Dumbo rescuing an articulated bus on King William Street in 2011.

This is a rare case of weird infrastructure demanding even weirder vehicles to keep it running. If the self-guided buses weren’t strange enough, the double-ended tow truck should satisfy your hunger for oddball vehicles for some time. You’re welcome.

Image credits: Top shot via Wongm’s Rail Gallery, Embeds via Ryan Smith (Popplio728 on Flickr)