Looking Back: Freightliner roots traced to Oregon shop
So to make his trucks lighter and more efficient — because it was no easy thing to find parts during the Depression — Leland and his CF mechanics did a lot of tinkering out in their Portland, Ore. shop.
The Trucker News Services
11/21/2008
Leland James never intended to become a truck manufacturer, but his experiments to build a lightweight, durable truck with a better ride led to Freightliner’s birth.
So here was Leland James back in the 1930’s fiddling with his rolling stock, trying to come up with some replacement parts to make his rigs lighter and sturdier, and to improve the rough ride. This was a fellow who had been a trucker since he was 19, in 1911. He had picked a rugged year to start Consolidated Freightways, as it turned out; it was 1929, the year that opened the gate of the Great Depression.
So to make his trucks lighter and more efficient — because it was no easy thing to find parts during the Depression — Leland and his CF mechanics did a lot of tinkering out in their Portland, Ore. shop. He had no ambition to be a truck manufacturer; he even went to other manufacturers offering them his ideas. It just sort of happened that he founded what eventually became a goliath of the trucking industry: Freightliner. Although Freightliner celebrates its anniversaries, marking time from 1942, the company actually had its beginnings in 1937, back in that Portland maintenance shop. The whole idea was to find a way for CF to haul bigger payloads and build up revenues. James did not even want to build the light-weight cabover designs he had fashioned in the Portland shop. But because he could not interest an existing manufacturer to build them, he was forced to build them himself.
Aluminum parts experiments led to first cabover
CF’s fleet’s mechanics were constantly creating customized parts and rebuilding rolling stock to find ways to lower operating costs. And, during the Depression, it also wasn’t easy to find replacement parts.
James’ mechanics used aluminum substantially in replacement parts to save weight--aluminum brake shoes, suspension hanger brackets and pulleys for ice-pack reefer trailers, and in 1936, to truck and trailer bodies. By the mid-1930’s, Consolidated’s Portland mechanics were experimenting with a multitude of cabover engine designs.
The first COE: the “Monkey Ward” Freightliner
In 1937, Consolidated’s mechanics and engineers shaped an old Fageol conventional chassis into a sheet-metal cabover design, with the nose shaved down, and used a six-cylinder Cummins diesel engine. The 20-some Fageol make-over COE’s built between 1937 and 1939 later became known as “Monkey Ward” Freightliners because they looked as if they could have been built from mail-order parts. But each one of these “Monkey Ward” Freightliners got a little better. James’ new trucks bore the name “Freightways” until 1941. By then, he had experimented with aluminum and magnesium parts and had been building whole trucks and trailers entirely from the light metals. He had hired a group of engineers in 1939, and they worked on designs that James had sketched out from his “Monkey Ward” prototypes.
Two prototypes were assembled in 1940 in a small shop in Portland on CF property. The first aluminum COE weighed 2,000 pounds less than anything comparable on the road, and although it was “a tough, handmade kind of thing,” according to Tom Taylor, who at the time had been a traveling auditor from James’ staff, “it expressed the concept.”
James took his idea to other carriers and established a cooperative network of them in the west to build the new trucks. In unification with five other motor carriers, he launched Freightways, Inc., and in 1940 James and his Freightways partners established a subsidiary, Freightways Manufacturing Co., Inc., a joint venture to build prototype Freightways trucks for the new partnership.
In 1940, $1,500 cash launched the company
Freightways Manufacturing Co. was launched with a whopping $10,000 capital, of which only $1,500 was cash. The rest was promised capital and “other valuable considerations” by the individual Freightways carriers. Alcoa, Cummins, Eaton, Fuller and Rockwell added their aid in engineering, metallurgy, finance and production methods.
Here was the functional genius of the early Freightliner “shovelnose” COE of 1941. North Dakota, for example, had a 50-foot overall length requirement, and having the shovelnose allowed Freightways to have more trailer and haul more load. The precursor to the Freightliner Conventional was a modified conventional that bore no nameplate and was monikered as “The No Name Conventional.”
The first Freightways COE went into service in the summer of 1940 out of CF’s Billings, Mont., terminal and was constructed in Salt Lake City. The name Freightliner first appeared on a truck as a hyphenated “Freight-liner” in reference to a new truck-trailer combination.
Government seized aluminum, broke up cooperative in WWII
The U.S. Government desperately needed the aluminum and magnesium in Freightway’s supply, and the War Production Board seized the supply in 1942, not long after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
By 1942, Freightways converted its Salt Lake City manufacturing plant entirely to war production as part of the defense industry, building airplane piece parts and other wartime necessities.
At the same time, the U. S. Justice Department sued Freightways, Inc., claiming it ran a monopoly in restraint of trade. By 1944, the carriers affiliated with Freightways accepted a consent decree that broke up the arrangement. But, showing foresight and wisdom in sniffing out a long, hard legal battle, Freightways Manufacturing Company had changed its name in1942 to Freightliner Corporation.
But the cost of the long court fight, coupled with the fact that supplies of materials just weren’t available during wartime, caused Freightliner to close the Salt Lake City plant for the duration of the war. None of the Freightways systems partners considered the manufacturing plant much of an asset and had offered to give it to Tom Taylor. But Taylor had taken a commission in the Navy. So, James shipped all of his tools, patterns, dies and drawings to a Portland warehouse to wait out the war.
Freightliner’s second birth was in 1947
On January 2, 1947, James swept the cobwebs off the doors in temporary quarters in Portland and opened the rusting locks. In spite of the fact that the company had no actual factory and was armed with no materials and no money, Taylor and five of the six original crew members came back to head things up.
Taylor was an imaginative fellow, and he raised some cash by selling automotive and truck parts--mostly war surplus batteries and truck wheels--to help finance the operation. He talked someone into loaning the company $60,000, and he bought some property for a plant.
One exciting development at the time was that aluminum and magnesium alloys had been greatly improved during the war, and Freightliner produced lightweight COEs that were far superior to its prewar models. Thirty Freightliners went into service in 1947, all for Consolidated Freightways. That winter, the Freightliner cab was redesigned to make room for a larger radiator, with the bubble of the cab nose raised up to the windshield and the corners rounded out on an all-aluminum frame. This design became Model 800, better known as the famous Freightliner “Bubblenose.”
The facility doubled in size in 1948, when the company made its first sale outside of CF, to a Portland produce hauler who worked for CF in his slow season, Vince Graziano. He needed a truck that would defer to Oregon’s 60-foot overall length limit while increasing his payload. He also wanted a more powerful diesel engine and a bigger transmission to handle the Northwest’s steep mountain grades. His first Freightliner, Number L-89 in his fleet, was delivered in October 1948 and had a 275 hp Cummins supercharged diesel engine, the first of the all-aluminum Model 800 bubblenose series.
By 1949, Freightliner had 62 employees and turned out 56 trucks. In 1950, the Hyster Company of Portland became the first private carrier to order a Freightliner tractor, a Model 900 Bubblenose COE, the same as the Model 800, but with a built-in sleeper for the relief of the driver. This model was the first standard tractor to have a 19.5 inch main driveline, the shortest available at the time. The tractor was so short that it could legally pull a 35-foot trailer through states with 45-foot overall length restrictions.
Deal with White brought national recognition
By this time, with the success of the Bubblenose and the word spreading, the demand for the COE Bubblenoses increased significantly in the early 1950s. Freightliner would become famous for building trucks to the customer’s specific requirements during those years, adhering to the concept that the customer knows what he wants.
During the 1950s, sales multiplied swiftly, doubling to 116 units in 1950. Very little thought had been given to marketing Freightliners, but in 1951, the newest truck manufacturer signed an exclusive sales-service agreement with the oldest truck manufacturer, White Motor Corp. The marriage brought a new nameplate, “White Freightliner” and a new slogan devised by White’s marketing department: “Lightweight – More Freight.” Sales jumped to 189 units in 1951. In 1952, Freightliner moved production to a new 48,000 square foot plant on Swan Island in Portland. That year, Freightliner introduced its new WF-4864 Spacemaker, the first Freightliner COE with a flat face instead of a bubblenose, and a 4x4 WF-5844 model, which had superior pulling power and traction on snow and ice, and which helped Consolidated pioneer the use of doubles. A roomy sleeper unit with a 75-inch BBC was introduced in 1954, the WF-7564.
In 1958, Freightliner introduced the first tilt-cab COE, the White Freightliner 8164T, allowing a revolutionary-easy way to get to the engine for maintenance.
Eased Size and Weight Restrictions brought New Opportunities
Freightliner’s sales volume continued to grow in the 1960s with the easing of size and weight restrictions. The increased need for more cubic capacity and the growing demand for doubles fit right into what Freightliner was building, such as the double-decker cab with dromedary box, which enabled a total of 43 feet of loading space within a 50-foot overall length. In the 1960s Freightliner later built an experimental TurboLiner, with gas-turbine engine and weighing 2,400 pounds less than comparable piston-driven tractors, but, alas, the rising cost of gasoline doomed the project.
In 1974, 10 years after Leland James’ death, Freightliner completed delivery of its 100,000th truck, and that same year, the first completely Freightliner-designed conventional went into production, the Freightliner Long Conventional model. This was about the time that double-digit inflation and the energy crisis caused the Class 8 truck manufacturing business to hit bottom. The knockout blow came in 1974, when the U.S. Government’s Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 121 mandated a costly and controversial anti-skid brake system.
Truckers moved their purchases forward to avoid the mandate on the 1975 models, and Freightliner sales in1975 fell off by 67 percent. Even though Standard 121 was later overturned in the courts, Freightliner for the first time failed to make a profit. This financial climate caused Freightliner to terminate its sales agreement with White in 1977, when the contract expired, and to set up its own independent distribution center.
Freightliner dealerships were established and the company began to again prosper. In 1980, Freightliner added the extremely popular 60-inch sleeper box to its Long Conventional. In 1981, Daimler-Benz AG acquired virtually all of Consolidated Freightways' stock and Mercedes-Benz Truck Company, Inc. became a Freightliner subsidiary, prompting a new field sales force and a change in marketing strategy.
Freightliner continued to gain in market share during the 1980s. Deregulation and relaxed limits on truck and trailer length caused truckers to shift from the high COE to conventionals. But with its new models, Freightliner was prepared for the changing market.
Freightliner is definitely on a roll. In 1976, the company had only 8.1 percent Class 8 market share in the U.S. This year, Freightliner’s Class 8 market share in the U.S. has grown to an industry-leading 24.9 percent.
And to think, Leland James, the Oregon business maverick, was just trying to show other manufacturers that his ideas were sound and had some merit. That’s how it all got started. Well, Mr. James, we can say, unequivocally, beyond any pillar of doubt, you proved your point — and then some.