...my interests

The trucks and trailers has always been my very special interest as long as I could think. Born in 1956, as a boy I could see famous trucks like BÜSSING, KAELBLE, KRUPP, FAUN, HANNOMAG, HENSCHEL and more on the roads and you could see me at every construction site in my home city Wolfsburg.
At the age of approx. 10 years I was wondering about the rear axle steering of a Scheuerle 4-axle trailer and made some models building this steering system. This was one of the reasons for my special interest in steering geometry and later on I did a lot of calculation-sheets to simulate the steering system and to calculate the steering angle of a given system, the deviation from the correct (theoretical) value and optimise the geometry (position of levers and rods) for lower steering angle deviations. This was done before I started getting educated as an engineer.
I studied mechanical engineering from September 1973 to January 1977, so I was nearly 21 years old when I pass the engineers exam.

German truck BÜSSING 8000

...my profession (part 1)

After one year at the army, where I passed my truck drivers licence test, I got an employment as an design engineer 600 km away from home in south Germany at the KAMAG Transporttechnik in Ulm in 1978, where I gained my first experience in design work for heavy load transporters for ship yards and steel works (for example: several transporters for the NASA Space Shuttle Canister or the 1984 build 11-axle 300 ton self-propelled unit for British Steel Corporation in Sheffield, in 2001 still working!), but never "on-road"-vehicles.

At KAMAG Transporttechnik (founded 1969 by Karl Weinmann and F.X. Kögel) I learned a lot of the engineering of self-propelled heavy load transporters, which we built uniquely customer specialized.

KAMAG Typ 1507+4
für BRITISH STEEL CORPORATION

...my profession (part 2)

Nearly ten years later (January 1987) I started at Goldhofer with the towbarless aircraft tractor project. One year as a completely "one-man-show" in the design department, the second year with an additional female draughtsman making with me all the layouts and drawings for all parts of the completely new product (bear in mind that Goldhofer formerly built only trailers without any self-propulsion-units, no experience for drivers cab with all the electrics and so on...). After two years (end of January 1989) the first prototype was ready for testing with Swissair in Zurich airport.

Since then our team increased steadily and we designed a completely line of different towbarless aircraft tractors, hydrostatic driven for the hole range of civil aircrafts from BAe146 up to B747 (from 100,000 lbs up to 1,000,000 lbs take off weight) and since April 2005 you could see our 800 hp powered AST-1 X 800 for the new Airbus A380 (which could have a max. weight of approx. 1,300,000 lbs) on test-runs at several European Airport.

By mid of 2005 more than 250 Goldhofer AST towbarless aircraft tractors are in operation and worldwide more than 5,0 Mio push-back-operations and maintenance towings are done with Goldhofer AST tractors.

AST-1 X 800 is finished!

...my hobby

As I have been working in this industry for nearly 30 years, I have found that no company has consequently archived the history of their technical development and the people who know the historical steps are retiring one by one. So I try to collect information about the history of the heavy haulage business in the little spare time I have (main interest: heavy haulage trailers, because there are a lot of books regarding the trucks).

This basic interest is the reason to built up this web-site.
 

I try to get contact to more people around the world to get more information, especially about the heavy haulage trailers. May be, I can collect material enough to publish a printed version of this "HEAVY HAULAGE HISTORY" in future days.
 

The first documentation I finished together with Mr. Lothar Husemann in July 2005 is the book:

 HEAVY HAULAGE
 VEHICLES built by GOLDHOFER

The first edition, which was published by Motorbuch Verlag Stuttgart / Germany, has 232 pages and is

 NOW available in English!

 You will find more than 400 very interesting pictures of the actual program, mainly in colour, but also historic b/w photographs and different drawings from the begining of "Allgäuer Fahrzeugwerke Alois Goldhofer KG".

More about this book: ISBN 3-613-02681-3

British SCAMMELL Contractor

...other interesting things

My basic interest about technical history is the reason for buying some books (as my wife told me: "too much books...") and another interest and so also a main part of my books is about airships-history and airship-technology.

ZEPPELIN LZ 129 over New York

...a big help

My most used tool for mobile data collecting, not only for the historical data, is the PSION Computer with his absolutely stable EPOC operating system.

Started in 1995 with the famous Series 3a, I am working today with the Series 5mxPro and the PSION netBook.

PSION Serie5 Organizer