Looking Back: Freightliner roots traced to Oregon 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. T