Manly Council’s Volvo SL
A while back I uploaded a video of a Manco SL85 being given a demo run in Manly Council in late 2011. The council did end up buying a side load collection vehicle, but instead of a Manco/Hino, they ended up ordering a new 25m MJ GenV to place on a Volvo FE. Manly had always been a rear loader only collection area, so this addition in 2012 was a big break in tradition. Rather than having a 3-man crew like on the rear loaders, just a single passenger would come along in the side loader to pull bins out on the road, being essential or ideal in some areas more than others. As with the rest of the fleet, a load of garbage would be done first, then a load of recycling second, otherwise with Wednesday vegetation runs, there would be no shortage of lime lidded 240Ls for it to flip.
I got out there a few months prior to the massive northern beaches contract starting with URM in 2019, aiming to catch a bit of the last Manly domestic runs before the in-house side of things wrapped up. Unit 64001 was on the to-do list, being the one and only Manly side loader in history. On a Tuesday I located the truck servicing a residential section between the suburbs of Fairlight and Balgowlah, getting it on the last part of the garbage run and hanging around to catch the second sweep for the bottles recycling. Most of the action is from house collections with a few unit blocks mixed in, showing the original black body Nylex recycle bins and dark green 80L/240L garbage bins that came later, which all got replaced by new MGBs for the big merged council contract. Cheers to the two blokes at work for being cool with me following along to video.