Truck Show

In 1899, 13-year-old John Frost Winchester went to work as an apprentice machinist in Peabody, Mass. Presently Jack Winchester became one of the first students in a Boston Y. M. C. A. automotive school. He worked on the first automobiles to reach the U. S. from abroad, learned to drive a "steamer," helped devise the first self-starter. In 1913 he landed a job as sales engineer for Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey. Standard now operates 12,000 trucks and 4,000 cars, second largest fleet in the U. S.* Jack Winchester is manager of the lot. He is also president of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association, vice president of the American Trucking Association. Three years ago, Truckman Winchester conceived the idea of a national truck show, got Standard Oil and several truck makers to sponsor the first one in a Newark armory. Last week, as automobilemen prepared for their 1936 Automobile Show across the river in Manhattan (see p. 93), held in Newark under Jack Winchester's management was the third and most successful National Motor Truck Show.

The Truck Show is held in Newark because Newark is the nation's greatest highway freight centre, because Jack Winchester wants it there and because Newark's vast municipal Center Market Building can be rented cheap. On its two dank floors last week gleamed and glistened a collection of trucks, bodies, trailers, engines and accessories from 60 leading U. S. manufacturers. As in the Automobile Show, the exhibits included gadgets, displays, sections of engines, cinema demonstrations. Unlike the Automobile Show, the Truck Show's exhibits were aimed not at the general public but at the comparative few whose business it is to move freight over the roads.

The last words in trucks this year are streamlining, lightness, safety and C. O. E. (cab over engine). By compressing the front of a truck so the driver sits directly over the engine, the maker gains numerous advantages: 1) better teardrop streamlining; 2) equal freight capacity with considerably shorter wheelbase, which makes driving and parking easier; 3) better load distribution, so that the front wheels carry as much weight as the rear wheels. Practically all truck makers have plumped for C. O. E. Profiting by the experience of automobile makers who rushed too fast into streamlining, most truck makers have adopted it only in modified form. Modern trucks move fast enough to make streamlining worth while. But it has one detriment--curved body corners cut down space within.

Some old-fashioned truck tractors and their trailers weigh ten tons unloaded, 40 loaded. To reduce vehicle weight, trailer makers are experimenting with the new Pullman technique of incorporating the frame in the body. As for safety, truck makers now claim that the driver alone can be improved.

Most interesting exhibits to the layman browsing about the Truck Show: a huge, streamlined, refrigerated milk truck with a little propeller inside the tank to keep the milk slowly circulating so it will not be churned into butter; the Diesel engines newly introduced in U. S. trucks; a semi-streamlined, green police patrol wagon for $2,000. To the truckman, more exciting was the talk on all sides of the current truck boom. In 1935, 3,655,705 trucks ran over U. S. highways -- slightly more than in 1930. Last year total sales in the U. S. and Canada were 732,005 trucks. Said Truckman Winchester last week: "This year sales should run 15% to 20% higher, depending largely on the course that local legislation takes in restricting highway freight traffic."

* Largest: Bell Telephone companies operating 13,000 trucks, 4,200 cars.

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