Early Work

The Truckfax blog was established as a way to share my truck photos both past and present. In recent months I have not been taking pictures of trucks very often and even then they were of no particular interest or distinction. Weather of course was a factor - getting about in winter is less and less enjoyable.

While I have not exhausted my collection of past photos by any means, I seem to have shown the most interesting and the best.

Therefore - although this is a little late to announce it - Truckfax will be taking a break over the summer months too. This will allow a little time to accumulate some new material and perhaps work on some of the old photos to make them presentable.

The photo featured here is the first truck photo I ever took.

I do apologize for the quality, but there were extenuating circumstances. The 1957 Dodge pulling in on the right made me click a tad earlier than planned (and the truck was moving). That is my grandmother's 1957 Plymouth wagon on the left which was between me and the shot I really wanted. The camera was one of those ones you had to look down into to aim, so that is why the eye level is so low, and why I couldn't shoot over the car.

However it is the truck that was important. Single drive axle semis with tarp top, stake side, two axle trailers were pretty standard in those days. The C series Ford tilt cabs were still a bit of a novelyy since they had only been in production since 1957.
But it was the integral sleeper that was the real object of the photo. I am not sure that this was a factory option back then, but it was very rare. Certainly the first one I ever saw.  A similar, but windowless (and possibly plastic) sleeper of similar dimensions shows up in brochures in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The photo was taken on (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend while on a shopping trip to Buffalo, NY (stores there were open on the Monday), so it is a US truck. I believe the date is 1958 - both from memory and from the model year of the cars. (It's a 1958 Chevrolet in the background). Who would have suspected in 1958 that C-series tilt cabs would remain in production until 1990?

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