Retired Truckers Remember

All retired truck drivers remember the hard rubber tires of the good old days. It was widely believed that they were necessary to handle the weight carried by trucks. That made it difficult for tire manufacturing companies to have their products excepted by the trucking industry.

The Good Year Co. designed the rubber pneumatic cord tire in 1912, but didn't introduce it until 1916 to the truck manufacturers. To prove their tire to the general public and to the trucking industry and truck drivers, they formed Wingfoot Express. They fitted a 5 ton Packard truck with Good Year 38-by-7 steering axle tires and 44-by-10 drive axle tires for a trip from Akron, Ohio to Boston.

The first trip took 19 days, due to very bad weather and terrible roads. The return trip was much better, taking only 5 days, much faster than the trains of the time. After much marketing fanfare, the Wingfoot Express was making the round trip on a regular 5 day schedule. They were hauling their own products therefore marking the beginning of interstate transport of merchandise by a private carrier.

Truck drivers will tell you, one of the great needs of trucking at the time, was a highway system. The roads were bad or did not exist depending on which state you were trying to travel through. Many roads, if paved, would suddenly end at county or state lines because on territorial rights and funding.

President Woodrow Wilson signed a Congressional created Federal Aid Road Act in 1916. This gave the Federal Government power to establish Post Offices and Post Roads. The aim was to create an interstate highway system and allowed Federal funding of 50 % of the cost. This aided the states and counties but fell short, because of tax base population.

Even earlier, however, a group of visionaries, led by automotive pioneer Carl G. Fisher, began talking about a coast-to-coast highway. In 1911 he had built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and created one of the world's most famous auto races.

It didn't take him long to promote and raise $4 million from his fellow automobile manufacturers, toward construction of a new road. On July 1, 1913, The Lincoln Highway Assn. was officially begun. This was intended to spur public interest and pressure public officials to continue building the the highway. The first seedling one mile strip of concrete road was built in Malta, IL. In 1914.

Few others were built and after the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, the assn. turned over three years of extensive studies and recommendations to the federal and state road builders. It had charted the beat route from New York to San Francisco and laid the groundwork for construction of US30. Truck Safely out There.