Never Stand Still

I'm right at the part now, where Consolidated Freight is entering the 1940's and they just started the Freightways Co-Operative out of Salt Lake City, Utah and basically they just invented Freightliner and were starting to ramp up production on the new Freightliner cab overs.

Actually in the 1940s that's when CF actually started going by CF they actually were already a nationwide network in the 1940s they went from Portland to Chicago and then interlined much like the regional carriers of today do. Any how in the 1940's CF started building Freightliner and actually they also developed the great grandfather of what is today's modern day 28' trailer. Due to length laws in North Dakota and Oregon they had trouble with the kind of rigs they could build and with Fageol going under they were forced to build there own trucks.

Leeland James wanted a better truck and what they were buying they were practically rebuilding anyhow. So Fageol goes under and they said forget it will build our own. What they did was built the Freightliner Cab Overs and they chopped off the 22ft cargo box and went with a 16ft cargo box and then had the trailer shop build a 28ft trailer and in the 1940's they had the 16ft truck and 28ft trailer to make the 16ft truck and trailer combo.

So right now were at the birth of Freightliner and the freightliner Cab Over.

 

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Pretty much all your base model trucks now from all manufacturers are pretty much junk bought by big fleets who have nothing but problems with them and in 10 years they sell them for cheap to Mexico and junk the rest.

 

Speaking of Never Stand Still right now were in the booming 40's in the history of CF. CF actually got in a little bit of legal trouble in the 1940's and while they had a lot of business because of the war they also had a fairly high cost of doing business, plus they were still fighting with Oregon to have them repeal there length limits which Oregon did do.

Anyhow CF was very busy hauling military freight in the 1940s and like the USF companies of today like Holland and Reddaway they had more freight then they could handle in those times.

 

Okay so it's time to update this, in the soga that was CF we are in the 1950's and early 1960s and here is what happened:

In the early 1950's Leeland James was getting older and his age was starting to catch up to him CF had been in business 25 years and well James was reaching the end of his rope as far as running the company goes. So naturally Leeland James retired and Jack Snead took over.

Snead had adopted a lot of the old Leeland James practices as far as company culture goes, but Snead was very very ambitious actually overly ambitious and like the US Federal Government CF went on a major spending spree like Alicia Silverstone would have done with her daddy's credit card in the 1995 film Clueless Jack Snead (Who ever thought you would see Jack Snead CF President 1950-1959 and Alicia Silverstone in the same sentence?, only here on The Truckers Report.)


Ahh fun times...the 1990's how magical....(Is it just me or does Silverstone slightly resemble Daniel Fishnell from Boy Meets World Fame? Personally Fishnells alright, but they tried to make her more then she really was you can do your own research on that one.)
Any how Jack Snead the president of CF was an ambitious man more so then Leeland Jame's in a lot of ways and he decided come heck or high water under his watch CF was going to go from the west to the east. So they got out there credit card kind of like the Penn Central Railroad only they didn't bankrupt them selves like the Penn Central Railroad so Snead said that's it were going on a buying spree and were going to be trail blazers and inovators. So CF went around purchasing trucking companies like they were going out of style. Naturally the ICC didn't care to much for this, but they allowed some of it. CF was buying this one and that one and that one and this one kind of exactly how really Transforce the big Canadian Company has been buying all kinds of trucking outfits up in Canada and had been changing the face of Canadian trucking. Well CF was there 100 years earlier changing the game!

So anyhow a lot of the companies CF bought wouldn't even be worth mentioning this was the 1950's after all most of them were small outfits there long gone now nobody would know them. But! There were two outfits worth mentioning, well everyone would know the one the other maybe not, but they were big enough to be mentioned.

In the mid 1950's CF's buying rampage lead them straight to Akron, Ohio home of what was at the time the biggest east coast LTL carrier and the name of that company was Roadway! Yes my friends CF tried to by Roadway. Now a popular name around Ohio that you still hear of today is the name Rousch they own some car dealerships and a motor cycle dealership and a truck dealership and I was actually discussing this history Monday night on the telephone with another member of this board and we were talking all about it.

Any how Gail Rousch who was one of the brothers who owned the Big R when he was halfway through his last signature to sign the company over to CF he just stopped and said "I can't I just can't do it very sorry." And that stopped the sail of Roadway to CF.

CF was not happy they wanted Roadway like a dog droll's at a hot juicy steak.

Well that didn't stop CF they went and bought another Akron, Ohio based carrier known as Motor Cargo, not the Motor Cargo UPS bought out I guess this Motor Cargo came before that Motor Cargo. Anyhow they bought out the smaller Akron, Ohio based LTL carrier and had there east coast accounting operations moved to Akron, Ohio.

During the 1950's CF did some really goofy goofy accounting and had some backwards accounting practices all of this eventually lead to Jack Snead getting fired, but were getting a head of ourselves.

In the 1950's Snead decided that it was time to trail blaze really put CF on the map forget the other companies there all behind the times. So he got CF into Intermodal yes that's right Intermodal long before JB Hunt did. Before JB Hunt there was CF.

Anyhow Snead got CF into Intermodal and Ocean Containerized shipping. CF bought a steam ship and used it for a Hawaiian service using shipping containers. Well Snead was so hot for Intermodal he also bought out a rail car manufacturing company in Youngstown, Ohio. Only problem was the company he bought out was broke as MC Hammer and it turned out to be a really bad investment for CF.

The intermodal experimentation did work to an extent but wasn't as good as the trucks and the steam ship container service to Hawaii ended up being a bust.

Snead was an ambitious man, but he just spent spent spent and spent the company straight into the red.

However one thing that happened that was the big begining was under Snead CF changed there logo to the CF logo were all used to seeing today. The minute James retired Snead said that the company needed an easier to see easier to recognize logo and had the companies advertising firm get rid of the old logo.

Also in the 1950's CF did away with the truck and trailer set up that they had.

This I know looks like a strange set up to most everyone today, but you have to understand back then the western states had strange length laws and this was the best CF could do.

What happened though was they found doubles to be more flexible. In California truckers had been using doubles for years and Oregon and Washington State wouldn't allow them. CF found doubles to be way better from an operational standpoint so they lobbied and the states allowed doubles and CF got rid of there truck and trailer set ups very quickly I think the last one ran in 1949 or 1950 anyhow by the early 1950's the antiquated truck and trailer was a thing of the past and the new new what we know to be as the modern day doubles were In.
They were a tractor and 2 18foot trailers, because that's what the states allowed at the time.

At any rate though it was a huge victory for CF and then Snead spent the company into oblivion and they fired him and the new guy came in and his name was William White and he came in and killed the steam shipping and toned down the intermodal and closed duplicate terminals and cut a lot of the fat if you will and got CF back on track he was an old Railroad man from the Erie Lackawana Railroad and he best resembles Sir Tophamhatt of the famous Great Western Railroad located on the famous Island of Sodor:

They said (Okay I said) William White and Sir Topham Hatt had much in common and had both adapted similar management styles. They would have been great friends they both shared a fondness for hats. Under William White CF also began using more technology just like Sir Topham Hatt did on his railway see here he is using a telephone these are exclusive photo's found in the corporate history of The Great Western Railroad.

CF was the same way in the late 1950's they bought there first computer from IBM used it to stream line accounting practices which they needed to do because they had screwy accounting and interdepartmental billing that did nothing but ad delay and confusion.

Anyhow William White got in there and cleaned house.

Oh oh oh also in the 1950's CF moved there headquarters to Menlo Park, California which is where Menlo Logistics that XPO came from got it's name. See how it all fits together?

Anyhow by 1950 CF had grown coast-coast and had ventured into some other things, but the board said enough was enough we need a ball buster and hired William White to crack some skulls and get the company back on track and into the black.

By the way Freightliner this whole time had been making trucks and was actually always making CF money unlike CF's trucking which didn't always make it money. At any rate though CF was the first company to do big things on a big scale way before the JB Hunts and CL Werner's of today.

 

Oh one thing I forgot to mention that Snead did with CF in the 1950's was, he created a truck and trailer rental company that his successor White sold off in the 1960s that is now gone known as the Rollins Truck Rental Company anyone remeber them? Yep Rollis bought out CF's truck and trailer rental business in the 1960's.


Also CF had invested and owned a company called TransiCold which was there trailer refrigeration manufacturing unit company. This company Transicold was also sold off in the 1960s and was sold to Carrier.

So the Carrier Refers you see on the roadway today are actually the great grand children descendants of Consolidated Freightways. So you see, CF was there before a lot of other people were they were first on a major level with truck rental and mechanical refers.

 

I always thought the national and regionals were redundant.

 

In the late 1960s early 1970s they did have some troubles with the Unions and Hoffa and there was a driver for CF who was shot and killed out side of St.Louis in 1970.

The Chicago Teamsters were pretty powerful and eventually CF gave them what they wanted in the early 1970s.

CF around that time also got into ocean freight shipping which ended up being a bust and White he started up some truck load stuff around that time. However at the same time CF sold off a lot of there specialty stuff.

White hated the tanker and bulk business and he got CF out of that.

At the same time though White loved UPS and there business and tried to get CF into the parcel business.


Now the way that was supposed to work was they were using the existing LTL terminals and trucks to get the packages across the country and the thing was though the terminal managers hated the Parcel stuff and CF did not have a good network for Parcel kind of work and the whole thing went belly up pretty quickly it was only around a year or so.

Other then that 1973 Obrien becomes president of CF after Bill White steps down and CF stream line haul operations for years out west CF used sleeper teams for western line haul, however trouble with that started to occur driver retention was bad and while it was cheaper then day cabs and relay points Union deals and stuff made sleeper teams more expensive and Roadway was using relay points and doing a good job with it so eventually CF followed suit and dumped the sleeper cabs in the late 1960s early 1970s.