Ive always been curious about these trailers

We were all shocked. Rumors flown around that Buster Brown was making overtures to get into LTL and they wanted to buy us. What’s interesting as well is GI Trucking was our non union sister company in the far west. Red Arrow was Union in the Texas Oklahoma area and Estes was our interline carrier for Virginia and parts of the Carolinas. GI was NOT an interline carrier and had full view of freight moving through the entire system and was privy to pricing, etc. ABF thought they’d keep all or most of CFCC’s customer base but by not buying GI, it opened the door for them to start going after freight and approaching Estes to take a significant part of CFCC’s customer base away from ABF. Now you have Estes and GI together
The terminal I was at at the end was a small End Of the Line barn as was the local ABF barn. The Union agreed to dovetailing the seniority lists rather than put the CFCC guys at the bottom. My barn had six guys on the board the ABF barn had 7. However, there was not enough work to keep all 13 busy and in the end 5 were laid off, 2 CFCC and 3 ABF. Great times going into work with the guy that just bumped your buddy off his job. I was bottom of the barrel so o knew I was gone but some of the guys that got laid off had 10+ years seniority. In addition we worked through the last National Freight strike which I still havent figured out. Was told that CFCCwent to the Union and said if they go out there will be no more CFCC. So ABF, Yellow,CF, and Roadway along with some other smaller Union outfits were on the picket line and we were working!

 

Still see a few GI trailers mixed with Estes here. But Red Arrow seems to have vanished from these parts. Same with Overnite. Seems the brown clowns finally retired all that old buyout equipment a few years back. Come to think of it I haven’t seen any as storage trailers. I think they all went down to Old Mex. There was a local intrastate company that ran a dozen or so of the old Overnite blue and grey Volvos for many many years around Tejas.

 

I think they’ve actually kept the GI name alive out west. I’ve seen some newer GI pups with a yellow back door and the GI logo on all four sides with a little script underneath it that says “ an Estes Conpany”

 

Saia bought out a bunch of old gray UPS Freight trailers.. I'm willing to bet some of them were old re-branded overnite trailers. Saia is rebranding them to spiffy old-new saia trailers with "scan this qr code to apply" decals on them, I'll see if I can take some pics later

 

The pups made much more sense for true hub and spoke operations like the old line LTL companies but less sense with operations like R&L has now. The terminal I was out of with R&L services an area with one terminal that CFCC used almost 12 small EOL barns and 1 city operation in a major break bulk to cover. The big difference is the stem times to get to the peddle areas. CFCC had EOL barns sometimes 1,5 hours apart and some stem times at R&L were 2 hours or better and 120 miles.

 

Please do. I’ve lived in NC my entire life and been in and around the trucking business since 1997, yet I know nothing about them. I’ve seen some old trailers around in the bushes but never took the time to do the research into the history.

 

Mike you probably need to take a vacation to North Carolina and visit the Carolina Freight Museum. I haven’t been there but I have seen many pictures and videos and it looks really nice.