Load kills truck driver

[Mace Canute]

Since we are speculating...I think it might have been a possibility that he had driven over a very rough spot some undetermined distance back and the loader "bounced" on the trailer...meaning the weight of it made the tires squat enough to make slack in the chains and on the rebound, the shock load on the chains when the slack was taken out snapped them. This shock load could be very large and easily exceed the breaking strength of the chain. It wouldn't have mattered if it were the front set of chains or the rear set...if the front set, that would have allowed the loader to roll backwards a bit under acceleration and introduce slack into the rear set which would have likely snapped under hard braking when the loader rolled ahead again. He might have driven quite a distance like that until he braked hard enough to start the loader rolling at a fair speed. By the time the loader hit the gooseneck, the difference in speed between it and the constantly slowing truck/trailer was enough to cause it to do what it did.

All speculation of course...

 

[bulldogshotgun]

I've pulled a JD644G a lot of miles.(38000lbs roughly same size machine).
snapped several 1/2" chains on RR tracks etc.
whiile unloading once had the state patrol tell me to back up 50 ft, already had chains undone while backing had the loader roll back into neck on the dropdeck, it hit the neck and stopped luckly.
my boss and i never saw eye to eye on how to chain it down. we both used 4 chains but i had 2 to keep it from coming forward and 1 to keep it from going back 1 for bucket. he did the opposite.