WORKING THE WICKHAM WAY

From humble beginnings in 1972 with one new Kenworth cab-over prime mover, Wickham Freightlines has steadily evolved into one of the largest, most diversified and well-respected family-owned and operated carriers in Australia. Paul Matthei listens intently as co-founder Peter Wickham describes the story of his life and the family company that ensued.

Wickham Freightlines Co-founder, Peter Wickham.

The saying ‘out of adversity comes opportunity’ was reportedly coined by noted polymath Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America.

It’s an adage that could have just as easily come from brothers Peter and the late Angus Wickham, founding fathers of today’s Wickham empire which has significant footprints in the symbiotically connected realms of agriculture, livestock and road transport.

Unfortunately, Angus had an untimely passing aged 58 in 1998, just when Wickham Freightlines was really hitting its straps. His legacy continues through Peter and numerous family members and employees who have worked hard to grow the various businesses into the outstanding enterprises they are today.

The brothers were born at Warwick in Southeast Queensland, 13 months apart, in the early 1940s, and in the early ‘50s the family moved to Spring Creek Mountain near Killarney, where their father took on a rundown property full of blackberries and scrub.

Incidentally, among his various talents, Peter enjoys playing guitar as well as writing and singing country songs, and recently recorded a CD called ‘Along Life’s Highway’. Song number four is titled ‘60,000th’ where Peter describes in song the family’s journey from the time the property was bought to the time that Wickham Freightlines purchased the 60,000th Kenworth to roll off the production line at Paccar’s Bayswater plant in late 2017.

As the song relates, for the first 10 years logging on the mountainside at Killarney was the primary concern and the logs were dragged down by bullock teams. As the Wickham boys grew up, and with diesel in their veins, trucks were purchased to replace the bullock teams, hauling the timber down the Condamine Track.

Peter explains that his main interests were farming and logging, driving the Ferguson tractor and operating the International TD14 dozer and chainsaws clearing scrub and felling timber, while Angus was the trucking man through and through.

“For us, it really all started in the late ‘50s when Angus, who was 13 months older, and I were in our late teens and eking out a living in the logging game,” says Peter, who recently became an octogenarian.

“We had two trucks, an NR Mack and a sort of hybrid prime mover that Brown and Hurley, a Leyland truck dealer at the time, built for us. It consisted of a Leyland Hippo that had been cut in half behind the cab, with the front end grafted onto a Mack chassis and tandem drive setup.”

Peter says the unlikely combination (a LeyMack, perhaps?) worked very well, although it did have its limitations, as the men found out one day when lugging a heavy load of logs down the Condamine Track and across one of the 14 rough creek crossings.

“We put this huge load of logs on it, and down we came with this big truck and Angus at the wheel,” says Peter. “He was taking it nice and steady across the rocks in a creek bed when one wheel got hung up on a slippery rock and that was that, there were no diff locks or anything else to help us out.

“So she sat there for the night and we walked the two miles back home. The next morning we came back with the tractor and gave her a shove to get her moving.”

FROM LOGS TO SPUDS The credit squeeze of 1962 made the logging work unprofitable so, as Peter’s ‘60,000th’ song goes, their father said, ‘C’mon boys now, I didn’t rear two duds, we’ll get to work and clear this ground and grow ourselves some spuds.’

The locals reckoned they didn’t stand a chance in that wild and untamed country but the two ‘boys’, then in their early 20s, and their father set to work to prove the doubters wrong. They cleared the mountainside, blowing the stumps out with gelignite to reveal the fertile country suitable for growing potatoes.

Their hard slog was rewarded with several bumper seasons, the spuds growing superbly in the rich red soil.

It was the need for a reliable truck to cart the spuds to the markets that eventually led the Wickham brothers to purchase their first Kenworth, starting a journey with the

iconic Australian-built brand that continues stronger than ever today.

Apparently, their father was none too pleased with the relatively high cost of the new Kenworth, as the song tells us: ‘Our father he was not impressed, he thought we’d run amuck, when we owed all this money on our first Kenworth truck.’

However, the brothers, having persevered over the previous decade with the likes of Austins, Commers and Internationals, that in their estimation just wouldn’t do the job, felt confident that they’d made the right decision. The success of the mighty Wickham Freightlines company of today is testament to their accurate assessment of the Kenworth capabilities.

The song continues, ‘Many tours of the factory we’ve had from time to time, buying every thousandth truck that comes off the line; see the factory people and their attitude is right, making sure every bolt and nut is always screwed up tight.

‘We’ll always just buy Kenworth ‘cause they’re Australian made, built for our conditions, other trucks won’t make the grade; with the Brown and Hurley salesman standing by the door, we buy them buy the dozen and own them by the score.’

Peter performed his song ‘60,000th’ in front of a crowd of 600 people including the entire Paccar Bayswater workforce at the 2017 handover ceremony of the 60,000th Kenworth built in Australia. He received a standing ovation and that night the song had amassed more than 39,000 hits on YouTube.

“The song ‘60,000th’ is about the history of my family and the business,” says Peter.

“I made up the song and sang it there, at the event and that was the start of it.

“I wrote the song to record my memories and what I’ve gone through. I bought a guitar when I was about 40 years old and taught myself how to play it, I’ve always been making up songs and that sort of thing.

“It’s been a real privilege to have the opportunity to put these songs together on a CD and I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Chris Cook, who owns and runs Chris Cook Studio in Kyogle, along with Chris O-Reilly and David Waddington who helped pull it all together.”

WORKING WITH THE MODERN KENWORTH Meanwhile, today in the Southern Downs capital city of Warwick resides Wickham Freightlines’ head office, characterised by the striking building that resembles a Wickham’s cab-over Kenworth prime

“We’ll always just buy Kenworth ‘cause they’re Australian made.”

Steve Lord, Wickhams’s Workshop Manager.

mover and semi-trailer. The place is a hive of activity, with a dedicated team working hard to keep the wheels turning on an operation that now encompasses around 170 trucks.

Steve Lord, who has been with the company for 15 years, is Workshop Manager and he expands on the undying loyalty Wickham has to the Kenworth brand.

“We strayed a little a decade or so ago when the EGR engines were giving us grief but in the main it’s been Kenworth all the way,” says Steve, adding that the company purchased 25 units last year and will receive another 15 this year. “They will mostly be K200 Big Cabs and we also have one of the first new K220s coming for evaluation this year.

“We’re pretty excited about the new K220 because we had a bit to do with its development, particularly in the area of cab suspension.”

Steve explains that Wickhams is a very proactive company that tries to improve products wherever possible to make life better for its drivers and the company in general.

One of these ameliorations has been to design, develop and test an airbag suspension system for the rear of the K200 cab to improve the ride for the driver. The full story about it appears in Tech Know on page 70 of this issue of PowerTorque.

Suffice to say the successful venture caught the attention of Paccar and one of Wickham’s K200s fitted with the cab suspension ended up at the company’s R&D centre at Bayswater (Vic) so the integrity of the system could be fully evaluated.

By all accounts, the upcoming K220 cab-over, said to be slated for release in June this year, will feature a similar cab suspension system developed by Paccar.

Steve says he’s looking forward to the new K220 breaking cover, and he thinks it will represent a significant improvement over the current K200.

“From what I understand they have done a lot of work on the wiring and cab layout including the air-conditioning system which will help bring it up to speed,” says Steve.

Wickhams has a similar philosophy of continual improvement and the company has been experimenting with different safety, comfort and aerodynamic features on the Kenworths for many years with varying levels of success.

“We’ve had some successes and some dismal failures, but if you don’t try you’ll never know,” says Steve.

RE-POWER TO THE PEOPLE One of the big successes the company has had was to replace the problematic EGR engines in 12 of its Kenworths with the later ISXe5 Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) engines.

“Back in 2015/16 we yanked the EGRs out of two T658s, two K108s and eight T608s and repowered them with ISXe5s,” says Steve. “We had a lot of people laughing at us thinking we wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but we have a good number of very talented tradespeople including sparkies, fabricators and mechanics working here and, with some help from a guy in Melbourne to make up a couple of new wiring harnesses, we got the job done.”

Steve says that after receiving the new wiring harnesses the sparkies went to work and replicated them for the other 10 trucks, which saved a lot of money.

“We used gold-dipped pins and good quality plugs and wiring to ensure there wouldn’t be any issues down the track, and we’ve been very pleased with the end result,” says Steve. “Those trucks have been going well ever since.”

Steve stresses that it didn’t just happen overnight, saying that the operation had to be strategically planned and everything had to be worked out in minute detail.

“I put two sparkies, two mechanics and one fabricator on the job and put them all in a room and said, ‘righto boys, this is what we’re going to do’, and we all started throwing ideas around,” says Steve. “We got the first one into the workshop and it was completely stripped down so we could work out the best way to mount the Adblue tank and doser pump, for example.

“We also put parabolic front springs in place of the multi-leaf items which improved the ride dramatically.”

After the first one was completed, the formula was perfected and the others were relatively straightforward and much quicker to convert. It was much like ‘rinse and repeat’.

According to Steve, the exercise proved fruitful and the money the company saved in fuel over the next three years paid for the conversions.

“The EGR engines were ridiculously thirsty, we were averaging around 1.6km/l pulling B-doubles,” says Steve. “In contrast, I took the first one we converted to Black Mountain and back and it averaged 2.1km/l with a brand-new engine and a similar load. So we knew we were going to make our money back with the fuel savings across those 12 trucks.”

Steve says he really enjoyed that project because it was a significant challenge to which he, and the other employees rose, and the end result was a great achievement of which they could all be extremely proud.

In the final wrap-up, the modern and efficient enterprise of Wickham Freightlines with its talented team of family members and employees is a fitting tribute to its founding fathers Peter and Angus Wickham.

The same can-do attitude, along with a steadfast reliance on Australian-built Kenworths that are fit-for-purpose in this rugged country, should ensure the success of the business for generations to come.