Ain't she a beautiful sight

Sunday Star Times Nov 19 2017

Unless your week included being beamed up to a spacecraft where they were serving whitebait and oysters and crayfish and David Bowie and Mick Ronson were playing Moonage Daydream – unless all that happened to you – your week was not as exciting as mine. 

There is nothing so thrilling in all the world as watching a whole house being hauled away in the dead of night by a mighty Kenworth on a huge trailer using Thunderbirds technology.

Our neighbours are building a new house, which has required moving the old one to Waipu. This is something I'd seen many times on the road but never at the actual point of removal, not until now.

Hauling day came and went, and came and went again, because there are plenty of ducks to line up when you're doing this. But on Wednesday night Thunderbirds were go.

At the first sound of the huge Kenworth engine turning over we were out the door to see the show. One of us even had a bowl of ice cream. When I collected the mail the next morning I found she had posted the bowl when she was done.

The Boys waited by the ute in their fluoro vests as the boss took one last lap of the site, checking, while the truck sat ready, lights blazing in the dark, house lashed to the enormous trailer.

Then the pilot vehicles threw on their flashing blue and orange lights and went speeding forward to line up across the road and turn it into the Manly Corso. What a sweet moment. You shall not pass, impatient Audi. Take the detour.

And now the moving began, slowly.

Once upon a time you'd have just had a big old truck and a stack of 4 by 4 posts. But in the 21st century you have a quad axle hydraulic house trailer made for the space age by Hamilton's TRT, with two axles steering and a Torsional Box Trombone with Low Loader spec design for especially heavy moves. You bet I checked out the website.

The truck pulled forward a metre or so. Then the guy standing on the back of the cab and driving the trailer engine inched the house forward using a whole bunch of hydraulic arms to tilt and shift it, little by little, as delicately as a sponge being lifted out of an oven.

And then before you know it the truck was out on the road and the whole house was way up in the air supported by this giant trailer with improbably extended wheel arms and it was the coolest piece of engineering I've ever seen, and reader, I've sat in a Soyuz space capsule.

The truck pulled round to face forward and now people gasped as they saw how much of a lean the house was on. Jarrod the owner says he was thinking: "if that thing falls on the road all of Devonport is going to hate me" and he was not wrong because you should see how the Audis treat the pedestrians. 

But the lean was intended, and safe as, well, houses. You use your hydraulic arms to raise it higher on the left hand side, and you stay clear of the cars, and the technology holds the whole thing rock solid tight.

The boss had been frowning in concentration but now he had a happy smile. I raved to him about the power and the technology and their skill. He said: "Nah, we're mongrels." 

I thought: that's the kind of mongrel I like: highly skilled, capable.

The boss climbed into the cab, and the convoy moved off at walking pace. I followed, taking one last video of the huge building rolling through the neighbourhood. As he got to the bend in the road, he changed up half a dozen gears and accelerated away as casually as if he were going to the shops for a pie.