Road Report, Western Stars

A recent trip to Quebec, also known as Western Star country, turned up a number of interesting Stars.

Many if not most timber haulers seem to to be Western Stars, and this one is typical of the heavy rigs.

What better to load the logs than a Western Star equipped with a Barko grabber.

There are also lots of long haul Stars on the road, including this deluxe unit with massive moose bars and extra lighting.

There are also numerous plane jane Stars, such as this day cab peat moss hauler.

There are Western Stars back home in Halifax too,

Atlantic Tiltload runs thus twin steer crane equipped unit that is kept busy with odd loads.

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CN 100

Canadian National Railway is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and as part of that they are setting up exhibits in various places across the country. Today it was a parking lot near the Halifax waterfront and score of CN's intermodal boxes of all shapes, sizes and colours, began arriving, for the most part using CN trucks.

CN has a large fleet of impressively painted trucks -of all brands it seems - no two were alike as far as as I could tell, and I did not see them all I am sure.

Navistar International BH74

Kenworth BN103

Freightliner BN135

Mack BH84

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Atlantic Truck Show, Moncton, NB June 7,8, 2019

All the major brands were represented, but not all were photograph-able due either to the tight spaces or the masses of people around the exhibits blocking the view. Apologies to Peterbilt and Volvo- their displays were just too popular!

I found most of the trucks on display indoors fairly unexciting. They were obviously demos and thus few had any custom paint schemes and there were no dramatically new models that I had not seen before.

Autocar

Freightliner

Navistar International

Kenworth

Mack

Western Star

It was a different story outside, where the trucks were supposed to be secondary to trailers or cranes or truck bodies, but they were real working trucks, and they were all Western Stars!

Then there was the parking lots where there were some real finds:

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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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Your Guess

At the Fairview Cove terminal today, a Niavistar International from Total Transport and Rigging hauled a camo'd Freighliner with its body concealed by blue shrink wrap.

Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what is under the blue skin.

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Bright and shiny

It seems that local refuse haulers are upgrading their fleets as some bright and shiny new units have been spotted recently.


Miller Group has a base in Enfield, NS where this unit was spotted late last month.

 Mack with McNeilus front loader was making a coffee stop which gave me time to grab a photo. The lifting arms are full retracted.

On the Halifax peninsula, REGroup had this one emptying bins along the Halifax waterfront.
 

By the time I got turned around to catch this one, it was speeding off to its next stop, with the lifting arms partially retracted. The low cab forward Pete, with cab quarter windows, also carries a front loading McNielus packer body.

 

McNeilus seems to have cornered the market for packers around here. The company, founded in 1970, also makes transit mixers. It has been part of the Oshkosh Corp since 1997, along with London which was acquired in 2006.

I posted this one earlier in the month, but it was such an impressive rig I decided to post it again just to complete the trio of the most prominent refuse haulers in the area. GFL Environmental (Green For Life) has the brightest trucks.

 Another Pete with McNeilus packer, this one a twin steer, still manages to get around some very tight spots in downtown. It may not be as new as the other two, but is still pretty clean.

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Front Yard Seat

A new water line going in has brought a lot of truck traffic to my otherwise quiet dead end street. I normally see the odd delivery van, oil truck and the weekly garbage trucks, but otherwise truck activity is rare.

There certainly has been a variety this week, both trucks and a crawler backhoe, a digger, a vibratory roller, and a skid steer.

A big Navistar International HX twin steer had a small load of crushed stone.

 A GMC arrived with a load of gravel.

2007 Freightliner showed up to load broken up asphalt and excavated material.

Rare Cat with DEL dumper was also in the mix.

A small Peterbilt tilt deck arrived to haul away the trench frame.


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