RAISING THE BAR

“Where I was working, the gulf country, it’s hard country.”

Back in the early 20th century a journalist called Frederick Barnard wrote a piece about the effectiveness of graphic illustrations in advertising. It was titled One Look is Worth a Thousand Words. It’s this piece of literature that’s widely attributed to the common phrase, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. That phrase implies an image of something says a lot more than reading about said something. Never a truer statement has been made than on this current page and the ensuing pages.

You really don’t need me to tell you how absolutely jaw-dropping this C509 is. All you have to do is look at it. Look at how staunch the big C509 is. Look at how amazing the paint job and scrollwork is. Look at all the lights and shiny bits. I doubt there’s anything I can say that’s half as impressive as just beholding this behemoth. The pictures certainly say a lot, most of what they say involves four letter words followed by any synonym for “wow”.

As solid as my argument was for a picture painting a thousand words, my editor didn’t see the funny side when I tried to charge him a thousand words for every photo I sent him. Instead, he abruptly instructed me to write more than just the opening paragraph. Luckily for me, the truck is a rolling advertisement for all those that played a part in it.

What the photos don’t touch on is the man behind the project – Andrew Hickey. I say “lucky for me” because Andrew is one of those guys that you automatically want to just open a beer with and chat. He has an old school aura about him where you just know he’ll call a