Today we're taking a look at the history of the once mighty Consolidated Freightways.
They have an interesting story, with some unexpected chapters - so let's get started...
CF's story begins in Portland, Oregon on April 1, 1929, which is where and when it was founded by Leland James.
James started out, like many trucking companies, with a single truck, which he would use to haul LTL freight around the Portland area.
Eventually, this would prove successful enough to allow James to consolidate four other local short haul carriers into one company.
James would also prove to be an innovator in the industry, particularly in the area of improving truck and trailer capacity during an era of stringent laws governing such things, namely vehicle length, during the 1930's.
Towards this end, CF would start up their own equipment manufacturing company in 1939, Freightways Manufacturing, which would build a great deal of custom trucks and trailers for CF.
One of these custom units, which James would help design, would be the first cabover or COE (cab over engine) tractor, which would allow increased load capacity by freeing up the space that the hood used, and allowing that space to be used for increased load capacity. Specifically, CF would employ "drom" boxes, which are essentially box truck bodies mounted on the tractor frame behind the cab, or using daycab tractors and longer trailers or 2 shorter trailers, known as "pups".
CF would originally remain focused in the area where it was founded, the northwest, but by the late 40's they had expanded to cover the entire west coast, as well as having established routes as far east as Chicago.
By 1950 CF would be operating around 1,600 pieces of equipment and be producing revenues of $24M.
In 1951 CF would go public on the stock exchange at $1.80 per share.
Also in '51, Freightways Manufacturing, which had been owned and controlled by CF, and built equipment exclusively for CF, would contract with White Motor Company to market and sell excess equipment CF didn't require. Freightways Manufacturing would also be renamed to Freightliner Manufacturing, and would acquire other manufacturing concerns, such as Transicold Corporation and Technic-Glas Corporation.
In 1955 Jack Snead would become president of CF, and under his leadership CF would acquire 53 smaller competitors by the end of the 1950's.
By 1959 CF would be the largest common carrier in the United States, with revenues of $146M and almost 11,000 employees.
They would serve 34 states, as well as Canada, with 13,800 pieces of equipment.
However, expansion and acquisition doesn't always mean success, and many of the acquisitions made under Snead were not integrated with one another, which would destabilize CF's finances, and this would result in a $2.7M loss for 1960.
Snead would be out, and William White would replace him as president.
White would restructure the company and sell off many of the subsidiary companies, with the aim to focus the company.
This series of events instigated by White would prove successful, and CF would return to profitability, with $451M revenue by 1969.
In 1977 Freightliner and White would split, with FL starting an independent dealer network, but a deregulation bill passed by Congress in 1980 would force CF to sell FL to Diamler AG on July 31, 1981.
CF would begin creating specialized divisions to handle different tasks, such as CF Arrowhead, a division based in Menlo Park, CA, which employed union owner-operators pulling specialized trailers, such as dropdecks and flatbeds.
In 1983 CF would expand into regional trucking with Con-Way Carriers (Con-Way Central Express, Con-Way Western Express, Con-Way Eastern Express). The Con-Way Eastern subsidiary/division was actually the former Penn-Yan Express, but Con-Way dissolved that company and CCX took over their routes.
On April 13, 1989 CF would purchase Emery Air Freight Corp and their subsidiary Purolator Courier Corp.
CF would merge Purolator and Emery into the existing CF Air Freight, which would then be renamed Emery Worldwide.
Purolator would actually be under a considerable debt load at this time, losing almost $1M a day at the time of CF's acquisition of the company.
In the early 90's Con-Way and CF Motorfreight (long distance division) were doing well, but Emery was doing the opposite, losing a whopping $41M company wide and racking up a staggering $614M in debt.
As CF had done before, they brought in new management to turn things around, with a restructuring and focusing plan.
And again the new round of management would prove beneficial, especially to Emery, which went from a money pit to the most profitable air freight company by 1995.
In 1996 CF would spin off unionized CF Motorfreight and 4 other longhaul subsidiaries from the non-union LTL division.
The longhaul division would be collectively renamed as Consolidated Freightways Corp, which was the parent company of CNF Transportation Inc. CNF handled Con-Way, Emery, and Menlo Logistics.
Emery would close their doors in December of 2001, due to poor fleet maintenance.
This juggling of divisions and subsidiaries wouldn't be of particular use to CF's fortunes, and CF Corp would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 2, 2002 and would cease operations.
Emery's freight forwarding would be rebranded in 2002 as Menlo Worldwide Forwarding, which in turn would absorb Emery Global Logistics.
Menlo would be sold to UPS in 2004,
On April 18, 2006 CNF rebranded as Con-Way, and operated under this name until October 30 of 2015, when they were acquired by XPO Logistics.
And that's it. Consolidated Freightways was gone, with the major lasting legacy being Freightliner.
That's all for today - turned out longer than I expected actually! Thanks for reading.
I never in a million years would have guessed that about how Freightliner came to be and still is amazingly withstanding the test of time. Although extremely unfortunate about CF demise.