The day after Spud and co-owner Ron Wheeler sold the business, he was back at work driving the company’s Volvo FH 700....as usual. He’s in it still...and reckons he probably will be till he quits - maybe in three or four years’ time
They weren’t long trips: “It’d be about 10k up the road and you’d tip it off. “If you weren’t doing that, you’d be doing hay…or you had your crate on.” But what Spud really wanted was “to be on the stock trucks.” By that, he means Aitkens’ truck and trailer units that worked widely around the North Island. Getting into them wasn’t a gimme: “It was hard to get jobs on the stock trucks then.” But, of course, he had the advantage of already knowing the runs: “Well, I had been there since I was 10 or 11,” he points out. And so, about two years after starting work, he moved fulltime onto his dream job – carting livestock all over the place. He loved it: “You started early in the morning and you wouldn’t get home till four the next morning. Then you might have two hours’ sleep – four if you were lucky. Two hours was a struggle – if you got four you weren’t too bad!” How did you survive? “Oh, you just did. And still played rugby as well!” You did, he adds (as if it explains everything), “get Fridays and Saturdays off.” He initially drove a near-new Commer with a two-axle trailer behind it: “You’d go to Gear Meat in Wellington, Southdown in Auckland. When the freezers were full at (the) Waitara and Patea (freezing works) you went to Hastings, Wellington or Auckland.” He ‘specially loved these long trips, which “used to take a while – 14 hours, something like that I think. Oh yeah, Awakino (Gorge) was about that wide (he gestures, hands close together)….You had to stop for (oncoming) trucks – or at night-time you would. “Going over The Hill (Mount Messenger) – ah it wasn’t too bad. Had about 195 horsepower…big horsepower in those days. Had up to 350 lambs on there probably….oh, you weren’t very heavy – 25 ton all-up.” Although the company’s stock trucks ranged far and wide,
carting to meat works, its clients were concentrated in the immediate Toko area, says Spud. Aitkens worked closely with other carriers like Scotty Matthews at Whangamomona – 55kms northwest, up State Highway 43 – and Jack Matthews at Tahora (70k away). “We used to go and help them cart into the Kohuratahi sale (between Whanga and Tahora).” These big sales “out the back” delivered “huge work” for the company: “Before logbooks, it was crazy hours: You’d cart away for two days (after a one-day sale). “Taylor Bros of Cambridge used to come down and buy a thousand ewes at Kohuratahi and you’d have to take them up to Cambridge…come back and get another load. By then it’d be daylight…you’d sleep on the side of the road somewhere.” At times, “back in the day, you’d leave at midnight to take a load of ewes to Hastings. Come back, take a load to Waitara… then go back out to the Kohuratahi sale and get a load of steers… “I think the best I did was 10 loads in a row (on successive days) to Hastings. Each day you were getting later and later.” Ask Spud how many Ks he’s clocked up over his driving career and he just shrugs: “Never thought about it. I wouldn’t have a clue really.” In the good old (no logbook) days, he explains, “never looked at a speedo.” He does know he’s only ever had one accident: “I rolled a trailer once.” That wasn’t down to a lack of sleep, but a bout of flu, he reckons: A couple of the cattle he was carting to a sale were killed – but there was no time for trauma counselling. First he had to round up all the cattle that had run down the road, get them back into the crates and delivered. Then, even with the damaged crate, he had to “do a load to Hastings. “Then I had to go up the Napier-Taupo, go across to Mooloo Welders up Te Kauwhata, and get them to straighten it up. Then I Truck & Driver | 87
