PETERBILT’S AUSTRALIAN FORAY©

By the early sixties, well-known Sydney transport identity Laurie O’Neil had acquired a lot of experience operating trucks through his family’s various businesses which included Australian Blue Metal (ABM). The O’Neil family had built up an extremely successful quarrying business, with interests in Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.

Laurie also had extensive experience in selling trucks through the ABM subsidiary company, Diesel Motors, which for many years was the Australian factory representative for Foden vehicles. While the Fodens were generally reliable and economical to run with their 112bhp and 150bhp Gardner engines governed to 1700rpm, their weak point was the worm drive differential which couldn’t cope with heavy loads when scaling the many big hills found on Australian roads. The modest power output of the Gardners combined with their relatively low maximum engine revs also meant that scaling those many hills on interstate trips was done at a leisurely pace.

On one of his overseas trips to the United States in the fifties, Laurie liked the look of the Peterbilts that he saw and paid a visit to the factory which at that time was located at Oakland, situated on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, in California. He found that the