Crackerbox Palace

[41chevy]

Crackerbox Palace - 1964 GMC DFX7009

With its dual front axles, GMC's modified 1964 GMC DFX7009 is half tanker, half van, all ingenuity

Crackerbox Palace - 1964 GMC DFX7009 from Hemmings Classic Car

Hemmings Classic Car by Jim Donnelly

 

This was Down East, heading into the mid-Sixties on the coast of Maine, where an Interstate highway looked so radically new that it might as well have been teleportation. Go far enough north between the woods and the ocean and the concrete slab went away; humanity started to dwindle away. Just not completely.

 

Necessity, however, can breed some interesting solutions. This one was called the tank van, an unorthodox innovation by Cole's Express, one of Maine's premier transportation companies, which was intended to combine a bulk tanker with a conventional 45-foot box trailer and still fit within maximum length restrictions as they existed nearing the mid-Sixties. It started life as a 1964 GMC DFX7009, with a 230hp Detroit Diesel V6-71 for power and a 10-speed Fuller Roadranger transmission. This GMC design is pretty historic in its own right. With its blocky shape and swept-up rear engine cover, the truck appeared in 1959 and became known shortly as the Crackerbox. It replaced the bullnosed GMC "Cannonball" line, and its short BBC (bumper to back of cab) measurement was also aimed directly at length-law compliance.

 

Cole's new GMC then got shipped to Chicago for some highly atypical changes. It went to the Hendrickson Motor Truck Company, which had patented the tandem-axle suspension for heavy trucks in 1929. Hendrickson later came out with a twin-steer tandem front axle, which it adapted to a variety of trucks, although it was most closely associated with International Harvester, which furnished the VCO-series tilt cab (also used by Diamond T) for an 8x4 twin-steer rig in 1958. Generally, twin-steer Hendrickson highway setups were rated at 22,000 pounds.

 

Galen Cole, son of Cole's Express founder Allie Cole, said the first of these Cole's "tank vans" was followed by three others, each GMC tractor modified with twin front axles by Hendrickson, but retaining their factory single rear drive axles. "We then brought it here and mounted an 11-foot, 3,300-gallon aluminum fuel tank made by Techweld of Burlington, Massachusetts. It was our idea from the start. We started out with a square tank, but they went to a rounded tank with greater strength, which is now standard for every truck. They worked beautifully."

 

The big tank was not intended to fuel the GMC, but instead, to use an elliptical pun, to keep it from running empty. Galen said that in the 1960s, a high percentage of Cole's one-way runs through Maine were deadheads, with the truck running empty. The tanks were added so the trucks could deliver fuel oil to customers along the northbound route. "We were running as many as a thousand empties northbound to Aroostook to pick up potatoes going south, plus frozen French fries and newsprint. So we had an imbalance going north. Bangor, where we ran from, was the headquarters of the Penobscot River, and all oil and gasoline from there had either been transported by tanker or railcar. Interstate 95 was completed by then, but once you got to Houlton, where I-95 stops and has never been completed, it's another 50 or 60 miles farther north on U.S. 1 to Caribou. Then it's another 50 miles to Fort Kent or Madawaska on the Canadian border. We always traveled the same route: I-95 to its end, then up Route 1 through Mars Hill to Presque Isle, where we had a large terminal. We carried oil in the tank on the way up. We could have carried up to 12,000 pounds of general freight, but we had such a surplus of southbound traffic that we generally ran the trailer empty going up."

 

Beyond its trucking company, the Cole family also ran the main Diamond T, Diamond Reo and Freightliner dealerships in Maine. But for the tank vans, Cole's Express chose the Crackerbox because its V-6 diesel's engine block was short enough to keep from intruding into space allotted for the oil tank on the GMC's extended frame. Before long, Cole's Transportation was running a four-unit fleet of GMC-pulled, Hendrickson-steered tank vans up and down through Maine, a solid 300-mile run each way from Portland through Bangor and up to Caribou.

 

In pure trucking terms, the Cole's Express innovation most resembles the "dromedary" rigs that were much more common in the Rocky Mountain states. These trucks used similarly long-wheelbase tractors (though usually without dual front axles) and had a tall cargo box positioned on the tractor frame between the cab and the trailer; they took their name from the single-hump camel they somewhat resembled. The regulatory environment in Maine was different from out West; in Galen's words, the state managed to get the law reinterpreted so that a dromedary-type tank had to be factored into the truck's overall length, making the whole combination illegal. One rig survives and is on display at the Cole Museum of Land Transportation in Bangor; visit them online at www.colemuseum.com.

 

"We fought with the railroads and we had a company ready to build us a truck bus, with a nine-foot passenger cab behind the cab," Galen recalled. "The Maine Public Utilities Commission said we'd drive all the bus companies out of business, and the bus companies were owned by the railroads."

Edited May 12, 2017 by 41chevy

[mowerman]

man that thing is tits man...pretty hefty lookin SOB...lol.thanks for the post....bob

[BillyT]

Remember the overhead sleeper freightliners? Allied van lines ran a few! All kind of innovation to beat those length laws! Couldn't legally sleep in one when running,but I'll bet a few did!, wouldn't get me in one while moving!

[BillyT]

Remember the overhead sleeper freightliners? Allied van lines ran a few! All kind of innovation to beat those length laws! Couldn't legally sleep in one when running,but I'll bet a few did!, wouldn't get me in one while moving! 41, I had a load of insulation one time going to Caribou, Bradco I think, about 3am going up 95, I miss the turn on US 1, next thing I know the sign for  95 is a different color and it says entering Atlantic time zone,wtf, and it hits me, I'm in Canada!  First time! So explain to the customs lady, she says " happens all the time!" So she lets me do a u turn and I come up on the American side he says "why wouldn't they let you into Canada?"so I have to explain again lol" years later it always seemed I was treated better going into Canada than coming back to the U.S.!