Is the industry better now that it was two and a half decades ago? Or are we surely going backwards. The Interstater gives us his take.
To survive 25 years in this industry like Owner//Driver magazine has is a major achievement. There have been so many changes in that time too, yet overall very little has changed. So how does that work?
Things have changed, things have altered, new things have come and gone, but nothing much has changed for the better overall. We are victims of repeating the same habits. Sure, trucks have become more expensive, more powerful, more pretty even, but have they got any better? Not really, not over the past 25 years anyway.
When you think about it, trucks have changed over the course of the past two and a half decades, but for every improvement it didn’t take long before we lost a lot of that gain. We went from 300hp VT903 screamers to the 350 Cummins racing cars, the 400 Club and the 475hp ‘892’ Bird Scarers, 500 bop bops of Pig, Dave Hecker and Macca, but once we got sucker-punched into the industry destroying A-trailer we lost that huge “here-we-go-out-and-about” feeling of showing the Hume who was boss.
The days of floating it off the top of Wagga Wagga, trying to get round the slow ones at Mut Mut for a clear run through the Cullarins were just a distant memory. It became a bit of a gentleman’s game for a while. We went from having around 110hp per 10 tonne down to around 90hp per 10 tonne. That was up until the yellow 550s started to make their mark and the red tops started to make their 580 more known and got us back where we started.
Then came the phallic extension with a 600 Cummins badge just below the door on the curved bonnet so as to not attract too much attention to the 25.5 metres that may or may not be an issue. Which I say was dependent on whether the cop had had a good day at home with the next door neighbour, or whether or not his missus was only wearing one sock.
We still had the ability to add a bit of the old pharmaceutical enhancement back then, but like everything else many have forgotten just how different it was. Either they are like the majority nowadays and would rather live in denial or they simply weren’t there.
Twenty-five years ago we nearly all smoked even though we were never given a decent ashtray and we didn’t even look for a cup holder. The UHF was still our only long distance communication device that blared away all night with the likes of Kerry Kenworth, Clarrie and Berrima blowing us all out of the cab, letting all and sundry know what was going on up ‘The Big Road’ (Hume).
We all thought an Eldorado seat was the best seat to have because it had a bit of a John Wayne sound to it, little knowing that it would give rise to many a spinal fusion. It was still a time of ‘pull ya head in’ or someone would tap you on the chin for being a dickhead. Respect was a matter of pecking order, and having respect for the blokes that had been on the highway for a lifetime longer than you.
Loading and unloading was still part and parcel of 99 percent of the freight you carted, and if you drove for any of the bigger mobs, you mostly got paid for it. But once tautliners became commonplace, it was silently deemed so much easier and faster to get loaded and unloaded. Then more and more employers were expecting drivers to “not worry about being paid separately for the privilege of doing it” because they were kind of paying you a bit extra in the kilometre rate to offset the difference. Yeah, right.