Laurie Williams and the Anywhere Truck & Machinery Heavy Towing Western Star you see on the pages before you are a bit of a contradiction. In the fact that, by visual appearance, this 2000 model 4900 Western Star is picture perfect. It looks cooler than the Fonz kicking a jukebox (if you don’t get that reference, then you’ve made me feel sufficiently old). It has a paint scheme that just snaps you to attention and it has more lights than a New York skyscraper. It is a truck everyone wants to see and everyone loves to see, unless of course you need Laurie and the Anywhere Truck & Machinery Heavy Towing Western Star.
That’s where the contradiction sets in, because everyone loves to see a cool tow truck, but no one ever wants to need a tow truck. If you need a tow truck, then things are not going well.
Rescue, repair or write-off, those are normally the reasons one calls a tow truck. Hence why I use the phrase contradiction when it comes to Laurie and his absolutely stunning Western Star. Technically I am contradicting my previous statement because I need Laurie and his tow truck for entirely good reasons – those reasons being that I wanted to share the story of this cool as ice Shining Star and the recent inductee into the Transport Hall of Fame who pilots it. I wanted to share his love of trucks, his passion for perfection and, most importantly, share his new second retirement gig at Anywhere Truck & Machinery Heavy Towing.
Laurie Williams is not a new name to either the industry or these pages. He has featured in shows, publications and plenty of online action with his legendary Western Star ‘Phat Cat’. One of the few Western Stars that is even cooler than this one, Phat Cat was the backbone of Laurie’s first retirement gig and, in between racking up millions of kilometres on our country’s blacktops, it became an almost unbeatable protagonist on the truck Show circuit.
Laurie’s attention to detail and knack for knocking up cool gear meant the hard-working Star deservedly picked up almost every possible award when he had it doing the rounds. Laurie also garnered a lot of attention a few years ago when he breathed life back into the old Bandag Bullet. With help from his Penske affiliations, and a lot of hard work from him and his mate, he unveiled the Bullet Burnout Truck, another truck that redefined the phrase ‘daaaamn’.
The Bullet Burnout truck was Laurie’s down time toy, while the ‘Phat Cat’ 4800 Western Star was the backbone on which he built his extremely successful company, North Queensland Truck and Machinery, where he hauled equipment, vehicle and machinery from Brisbane all the way up the coast. Laurie became synonymous with the Western Star brand, but that’s not to say he doesn’t appreciate the other classics.
The beautiful blue colour scheme he runs has adorned everything from International S-Lines to Kenworth T950s and even a couple of legendary FLB Freightliners. Those brands and several others helped Laurie thrive in the vehicle transportation game and now Laurie has raised the stakes again with ‘Phat Star’, while this second retirement gig has seen Laurie come almost full circle in his driving career.
Allow me to explain the full circle and the second retirement gig. I mentioned Laurie has come full circle because, back as a kid, Laurie began his working life as a tow truck driver. As affable as Laurie is, getting along with the hierarchy at high school was a bit of a struggle and the two parties agreed that school wasn’t for him. While Laurie may not have been enthusiastic in regard to his schoolwork, his work ethic was polar opposite. There was no cruise setting on Laurie – it was work your ass off, or sleep.
The result of that was, when Laurie left school at 15, he was straight into the workforce, and that workforce was towing.
“I was driving an old Dodge tow truck after I left school. It was back in the days where in order to be a towie you had to know how to fight,” Laurie told OwnerDriver.
“It’s very different now, I started just towing cars and literally fighting for work. Now the government regulations have pretty much cleaned up that side of the job and I have gone from cars to towing trucks.”
Laurie spent over a year behind the wheel of that Dodge tow truck, saving all the coin he could in order to buy his own truck and work for himself. While we are going to focus on the D-series Ford he purchased and created Laurie Williams’ Car Carrying with, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention the first truck that Laurie actually bought. It was a might Daihatsu Delta, which he used to cart scrap metal with – I’m not sure how much you could get on a Delta, but I am sure he made it work.
The roots of Laurie’s success came about when he started carting cars out of the auctions with the second-hand D-series Ford. There was plenty of work for a young man willing to get into it and Laurie threw himself into his work and took whatever he could. He learnt very early on to take pride in his work, be upfront and honest, and when he didn’t know something, to ask. Those traits have stayed with Laurie throughout his working life and back then it saw the young man grow his business to eventually be running a fleet of 14 transporters. His emphasis eventually moving away from direct towing to focus on multi-vehicle car carrying. In the year 2000, Laurie sold that business and took early retirement. His years of almost 24/7 work had earned him that right.
It is fairly obvious by the fact I’ve already spoken about ‘Phat Cat’, North Queensland Truck & Machinery and Bullet Burnout Truck, that Laurie took to retirement about as well as Jimmy Barnes after his 14th final tour. After years of working nonstop, there was no way he was out to pasture, and he began a new venture, one that would result in the creation of Phat Cat, a focused fleet of light and heavy rigid vehicle movements and eventually the resurrection of the coolest burnout truck in Australia. That business was North Queensland Truck and Machinery Movements.
No matter how successful and how expansive Laurie’s fleets got, he was never one to replace the driver’s seat with an office chair. He has always been at the coalface and, as such, probably has more kilometres under his belt than I have hot dinners – and you know I have had a few of those. That time on the road takes its toll on everyone. Towards late 2023, it reached a pinnacle for Laurie, with the end result being exactly what you see before you now.
“I was in Phat Cat doing a run up to Townsville and back. I had a road train on going up the inland road and this truck came round the corner barely on his side of the road,” Laurie says.
I am not going to quote Laurie word for word, as there are children in earshot. Suffice to say, many of us can relate to experiences like that, and it was the tipping point for the veteran truckie.
“I had just had enough, I knew I had to get off the road,” he says.
Coincidently, preceding this incident, Laurie had been dining with an old friend up in Townsville in Shaun Edwards from Aitkenvale Towing.
“It was actually my birthday and I was in Townsville, I went out for dinner with Shaun and he mentioned his old man was thinking of selling the Western Star Tow truck they had,” he says.
“On the way home, I had that close call and I just thought I had to get out of this, maybe I’d buy a tow truck and do it as a retirement job. So, I rang Shaun and said would you sell it to me?”
Being that 87 per cent of Laurie’s DNA is trucking, you can understand how his version of retirement is basically working, just not as much. It was also fitting that Laurie would look to his origin story for that retirement job – retiring in the same job he began his working life with.
“I just figured if I could get the tow truck then it would be my retirement job. I’d do a bit of trade work, and slow down,” he says.
We will get into how misleading, or maybe just optimistically naïve, Laurie’s comments were later. Let’s take a look at the ‘Retirement Truck’ that you see before you first. The 2000 model is an American import that came over to Australia as a short wheelbase day cab. It was built by AAA Towing in Melbourne who stretched it out, double railed it and put a whole new back end in it, as well as the 68-inch bunk on it. The team also mounted an Ekebol under lift wrecker kit to the back end.
AAA Towing worked the big girl for a while, before the tow truck caught the eye of the owners of Aitkenvale Towing up in Townsville. They purchased the Star and brought it up north where they repainted it into the familiar Aitkenvale Towing green and white colours. Over the next 14 years of the Star’s life, it racked up a mere 170,000 kilometres working in the North Queensland heat.
It was while the Western Star was up in North Queensland that it had previously come to the attention of Laurie. Though Laurie was full on with North Queensland Truck and Machinery Movements when he first saw it, and was in no need of a tow truck, the big Star still caught his truck-obsessed eye.
“For years I saw that truck up in Townsville, I always looked at it and said I wanted that truck,” Laurie laughs. “Now I have ended up with it.”
That birthday dinner with Shaun morphed into a career change for Laurie, even if he didn’t know it at the time. Once he got home, secured the deal with Aitkenvale towing, and sorted out the paperwork and obligations around his towing licence, Laurie flew up to Townsville to pick the truck up.
“I wanted a change from what I was doing, I needed to slow down,” he says.
“So, we did the deal and a couple of days later I flew up to Townsville and picked the truck up. I hooked up an MAN for a client and brought my first job back on that first run.”
While the old girl hadn’t really run up the kilometres associated with a 24-year-old truck, it was far from Laurie Williams’ standards. To start with, it was still in Aitkenvale Towing’s green and white colours. There were a few lights on it, and a couple of shiny bits but, all in all, it was about as far from a Laurie Williams truck as the man himself is from retirement.
Job number one was to send the truck off to Advanced Tech Auto Body Repairs for a complete respray. Hold on, that’s a bit of a simplification really. Phil, Kirsten and the team at ATABR didn’t just do a respray, they tore the big Star down and rebuilt everything. Every part of the truck came apart and it was a full ground up rebuild, repainting the chassis, the body, everything, as well as replacing anything it needed. Laurie wanted the tow truck to be better than new, and while the 11m chassis pushed the limit of ATABR’s paint booth, the job got done and got done beautifully.
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Now, no Laurie Williams truck is complete without shiny bits and an abundance of lights. There is no misplacing a Laurie Williams truck in the dark – he can’t drive near the coast for fear of confusing the passing ships. Hence off Phat Star went to Rocklea Truck Electrical for the additions – the bullbar alone sports 54 LEDs. I ran out of fingers and toes counting the rest. Credit also goes to South-East Queensland Tilt Trays who added all the LEDs they had in stock to the body of the tow truck. I reckon you could run one of those ‘guess the lollies in the jar’ competitions with Laurie’s lights being the lollies and the Star being the jar. Lighting up ‘Phat Star’ is a carryover from Laurie’s legendary ‘Phat Cat’ Western Star and another iconic feature is the souped-up cartoon self-portrait. ‘Phat Cat’ has it on its bonnet and Laurie saw it as fitting to get one drawn up for ‘Phat Star’ as well.
It took a fair bit of time for the transformation to be complete, in fact it was over three months before Laurie’s retirement rig was ready for him to jump into. That gave him plenty of time to de-escalate his other trucks. He slowed his workload down, sold off a lot of gear and retired Phat Cat, all in preparation for his retirement role. You may have observed the number of times I have used the term retirement. There is a point to that, mainly it’s sarcasm. If there was a sarcastic font I would be using it with aplomb throughout this article.
This is Laurie’s second attempt at retirement and he has been about as successful as his first attempt, due completely to the fact that when he sets his mind to a job, he does it professionally and thoroughly. These are two attributes that customers love, meaning Laurie has found himself not just busy, but expanding and hiring as his fleet has grown.
“I’ve now got the two big wreckers, the Western Star and the 909,” he says.
“I’ve got two Macks – one is a 6-wheel drive with a boom and under lift. I use that one as my bush truck when you have to go into the rough stuff to get something. I’ve got three super tilts, two bogie drive tilt trays and a small Peterbilt tilt tray.”
That’s not including the accessories like his Posi Trac and winch for clean-ups, the custom dolly for towing trailers and the shed full of other add-ons, all of which seem to be steering Laurie away from retirement.
“I really enjoy it, it was meant to be a retirement job and I believed I would slow down,” he says.
“But it has just grown, and I am loving the challenges of it. You really have to use your head. All my years of carting everything helps, but I am still learning a lot
and when I don’t know I just ask. Often when you tow a truck back to the dealers, you’ll ask them things and they are happy to help.”
Laurie has also found his tendency to treat every job as if it is his own equipment has seen his workload blossom.
“I had to do a recovery the other week of a 17-ton Roller that had rolled,” he recalls.
“Once I got it all hooked up, I picked it up so gently, winching it back over, it didn’t even drop. No broken glass or anything. They were able to take the injectors out, drain the oil, wound it back over and put it straight back to work.”
While doing the job well is second nature, the paperwork side and dealing with SWMS regulations are a learning curve, but again, learning new stuff has not deterred the retiree. Yes, sarcasm again.
“I’m not going looking for work, I’m not an ambulance chaser. This is still a retirement job,” he confesses.
Although I question that, as he has now become fully licenced for accident work too.
“I only did that because the customers I have want me to be fully certified and able to do all their work if needed,” he says.
That has seen Laurie invest in a holding yard and basically quadruple the amount of paperwork he has, as well as have every vehicle certified and checked off.
“I think what people like is when they call Anywhere Towing, they get me. If I can do the job I will, if I can’t I let them know. But when they ring, they deal directly with me,” he says.
Even as we sit at Laurie’s house on the Sunshine Coast, his phone rings and his retirement role kicks in again. Thankfully we had already managed to snare a few shots of his tidy Star before he was back into work again.
While I requested a ride along for a few more shots, I respected Laurie’s professionalism and approach when he shot me down. Like my opening statements, everyone wants to see the big Western Star, but no-one wants to need him. As such, Laurie was insistent that working shots were restricted to him showing me how the big rig operates.
It’s that respect for his customers and their gear that has seen this stunning Western Star retirement rig turn into a full-time, hands-on affair. I’ll just happily sit back and enjoy watching the big Star work.
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