Humble beginnings: 42 years and 1000 trucks later

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Owner/Driver  /  June 2, 2017

If you’d asked 22-year-old Glen Cameron, 42 years ago, whether he could imagine one day taking on his 1000th truck, he’d have told you “not in a hundred years”.

Glen kicked things off back in 1975 in his early twenties, using a single 8-tonne tray truck around the Melbourne area to grow his customer base.

As the story goes, Glen regularly made the walk from his depot down to a nearby phone box in Bayswater to book jobs and keep the wheels turning.

 It’s a case of ‘out with the old and in with the new’ for the Glen Cameron Group, as they reach a milestone with Mack truck number 341 being replaced by a new Mack, truck number 1000.

The 1000 truck milestone is one Glen and his team are proud of, and the handover in Brisbane last week commemorates a true Australian success story.

Lucky truck number 1000 is a 2017 Mack Granite Elite and it replaces the Group’s oldest prime mover, a 2000-model Mack CH Value-Liner.

"You know it’s been a great truck for us and has been relatively trouble free with its whole of life costs really low, which was absolutely a contributing factor in our decision to replace 341 with a new Mack," said Glen Cameron Group Asset Manager Shane Coates.

"In fact the truck has been so good to us that we are reluctant to move it on, it’s just that the truck is 17 years old.

"The average age of our fleet is around three-and-a-half years, so it’s time to retire the old Mack."

The Glen Cameron Group takes safety seriously and as a result the new model Mack has been fitted with ABS, Traction Control and Mack Roll Stability with a Jost sensor technology turntable.

Shane says the decision of another Mack comes down to how reliable they’ve proven to be in the past, particularly the 17-year-old Value-Liner being replaced.

"When we evaluate trucks that we want to buy in the future we don’t just look at the purchase price, we look at the running cost of the vehicle over its life… and the Mack has performed well.

"Achieving low whole-of-life costs for the old Mack were also low because the driver Micky Hyndman, who has been with Glen for 30 years, was pretty much the sole driver of that Mack for its entire period and took such good care of it.

"He loved the Mack, got good fuel economy, and he treated it like it was his own truck, delivering 20 tonnes of Cadbury chocolates to retailers every day for the past 17 years.

"Having employees and drivers like Micky Hyndman along for the journey makes it all-the-more rewarding when you reach great milestones like this.

"Whilst we are a company of reasonable size, Glen’s mantra here is that we keep it personal, we keep it flexible, we strive to do what our bigger competitors can’t do by virtue of their size, and that it’s all about the customer."

Today, the Glen Cameron Group is a multimillion dollar national logistics company offering over 250,000 square metres of warehousing space, a fleet of around 900 pieces of equipment and 400 sub-contractors servicing customers across 23 locations throughout the country.

It’s clearly a long way from that red phone box all those years ago!

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