Profile: On the road again—Part 1

By: Lyndsay Whittle , Photography by: Lyndsay Whittle

Date: 15.06.2021

Deals on Wheels' Lyndsay Whittle was on the road for his first paid truck driving job in almost 55 years ago. He recounts his experience.

On the first job still trying to figure things out

It’s 55 years almost to the month that I scored my first truck driving job way back in 1966, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I was asked if I’d mind doing a driving stint just a couple of weeks ago. How could I ever say no?

If I’d been asked as a 16-year-old kid, what kind of truck I’d be driving in the year 2021, I’d have thought you had rocks in your head; why quite likely I couldn’t even contemplate still being alive in 2021, let alone be still sitting behind the wheel of one.

It was a matter of happenstance really because I was only calling in on CRD Automotive to talk to owner Colin Dunn, who also owns Rainbow Haulage, about some mechanical matters that were far removed from truck driving.

Traffic-clogged Auckland roads at 11am

Colin was explaining that he had so much work at the moment that he was having trouble finding enough drivers to cover the shifts; this was in spite of the fact that he was offering pretty good hourly rates for the privilege of doing so. "Do you want a driving job?" he blurted out.

The proposition kind of took me by surprise, as I couldn’t imagine why anyone would be offering a truck driving job to an old dude who was coming up to his 71st birthday and who had hardly been on the road in the commercial sense for decades.

My initial thought was no thanks; I’m already busy writing magazine articles and restoring old trucks, not to mention trying (unsuccessfully I might add) to get in the occasional motorbike ride on a fine day, out with my buddies.

After a bit more coaxing from Colin, I spied a tidy-looking 2003 Isuzu FVZ six-wheel tipper sitting in the corner of the CRD workshop. Colin told me that it was going to need its clutch replaced and because its hoist was up about 30 degrees, I could see some substantial tears in the steel deck where it looked like some digger operator had hooked it with a rock bucket or something similar.

Still not wanting to commit to any more work than I already had on my plate, I had this thought in the back of my mind that Colin had been kind to me in the past by sharing his encyclopaedic mechanical knowledge, along with lending me his eight-wheeler transporter to go to the bottom of the South Island to collect a couple of truck restoration projects, paying for all the fuel to boot.

My conscience had been pricked and my eyes were still focused on that damn Isuzu that I’d quietly admired. Colin kept talking and I kept on looking at that bloody truck, with my mind quietly calculating the amount of time it was going to take his team to drop the gearbox, pull the clutch (and with any luck also the flywheel), not to mention that expanse of steel deck that would have to be removed before a new one could be fitted.

I reckoned that it would take them a month or so to get around to doing all that, giving me a bit of time to get my head around having to go back to work if I could convince myself to say yes to this preposterous request.

Nevertheless, the seed had been sown, and in the heat of the moment, I didn’t think there’d be any harm in saying yes to Colin’s ridiculous idea given the fact that the eventuality of actually starting the job would be some time away. "Okay, I’ll give you a couple of days a week as long as it’s driving that little Isuzu over there," I said.

Thinking back to my start in truck driving half a century earlier, the ‘little’ Isuzu (all 20-plus tonnes all up of it) would’ve seemed like a veritable monster when compared to the one-and-a-half-tonne Ford V8 I started off in.

Anyway, in 2021, a 280hp six-wheel truck is quite small when compared to some of the big rigs towing up to five-axle trailers. Small truck or not, my offer was accepted, with Colin saying he’d let me know when the truck was ready for me to start driving it.

I went about the rest of my day not giving any serious thought as to the commitment I’d just signed myself up for. In fact, I thought that Colin would most likely forget about the proposal and I promptly placed the whole idea right at the back of my mind.

However, I was in for a big surprise because it was less than a week, at about 10pm on a Sunday night I checked my text messages only to read one from Mo, Colin’s transport manager, that said: "Your truck’s ready. Job at a Takanini address. Need to be there at 0800hrs tomorrow."

An early morning wake-up call

The text had been sent earlier in the day, and if I’d checked my phone sooner, I would’ve had time to process the logistics involved in getting my sorry butt down to the Avondale depot, hopping into a totally strange truck and negotiating my way through the early morning Auckland traffic, all the way out to South Auckland, a 50km drive from my hilltop hideaway in the Waitakere Ranges.

Trucks lined up on Rosebank Road Avondale

I figured that if I was going to honour the obligation, I’d so foolishly committed to a week and a bit earlier, I’d need to be out of bed by about 5am. At seven o’clock the next morning, I was fumbling around in my new set of wheels, trying to fill in my logbook in the half-light (I hadn’t had to use a logbook for as longer than I could remember) and figuring out the shift pattern of the gears.

While the gear lever knob suggested that it was an Eaton-fuller box, it looked like it more than likely was a nine-speed set of cogs. Eventually, I found an interior light switch that when pressed, lit the inside of the cab like it was daytime and I finally had a better idea of my new surroundings.

I started the engine and the EROAD display kicked into action and I remember thinking that I wasn’t too sure I was going like having my every move monitored by some bugger back in the office. Anyway, I found what seemed like a low-enough gear to take off in with an empty truck and we were off—not quite like a robber’s dog, but on our way nonetheless.

A new set of challenges were being embarked upon, the first of which was the gate of the nine-speed (more about this in Part 2 next month) and the gridlocked roads and motorways at peak hours, a phenomenon you pay less attention to when driving an automatic vehicle.

However, the brilliant Waterview Tunnel made short work of getting from Avondale, onto the southwestern motorway, and finally out to my first job in Takanini—a trip that would’ve taken much longer via Spaghetti Junction through to the Southern Motorway. It looked like there was an interesting day in the making.

To be continued in the next issue.

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