Like I said at the end of the last post, my old Kenworth wasn’t a purebred. As I made some enquiries, I found that it had quite an interesting history that was closely related to the building of a major highway in BC, the Hope-Princeton Hwy.
As I was sandblasting the chassis and the cab, one of the coats of paint was orange and white, the old colours of the BC Dept of Hwys. And on the fifth wheel were the partial words “..and Forks”. So, I wrote a letter to the Dept of Highways in Victoria and asked if there was anyone who might know the history of my truck.
A few weeks later I received a reply from an old retired gentleman who worked on my truck in the 1950’s. Again, I lost all of my files and pictures in a house fire in 2000, so all of this is from memory…
He told me that there were two trucks originally. A 1948 Kenworth tractor, and a 1939 FWD dump truck. During the construction of the Hope-Princeton the Kenworth was pulling a lowboy trailer when it slid off the road, destroying the undercarriage and twisting the frame. The FWD also had a mishap during construction, flipping over and crushing the cab. Back in those days, they didn’t throw anything away and both trucks were sent to their works yard in Cloverdale BC. This was in ’55/’56.
The guys in the shop went to work to build a new truck from the two wrecked ones over the winter and the result was my truck. They put a brand new Cummins engine in it, a 5&4 transmission, and the Timken drive axles on a Rockwell torque arm suspension, all new. They used the FWD fenders and running boards but used the Kenworth Grille, hood and cab. They then mounted a 50 ton Tulsa winch behind the cab and put it back to work. I wasn’t just restoring a truck, I was restoring a part of the history of British Columbia.
I did some more digging and found out that it was sold at a government auction in, if memory is correct, 1973. It traded hands a few times from there, eventually being bought by Bergs Transport of Vancouver. Old George Berg wasn’t the most honest guy, and he sold it repeatedly on the never-never plan to a lot of different drivers, until the last one blew the main transmission up some time in the mid eighties. From there it found its way to the junk yard where I found it.
What ever happened to it? That’s the next post…