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Dennis Bell (x Vikings) and I drove “two up” together in Deluxe Coachlines for almost a year doing both Charter and Express work on their extensive Australia wide operation. I had been with Deluxe for around two years and I was looking for something to do for myself. My brother was growing flowers at Cobram in Victoria and he often complained that there was no passenger or freight service across the top of the State only via Melbourne. I took a week off and went for a look.
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In August 1982 Dennis and I started Albury-Mildura Express, we set up an office in central Albury, bought a new Toyota Coaster 22 seat bus and we were in business. (Little did we know that Trevor Steel worked 200mtrs down the road). We had set up our time table and route to work in with Deluxe and we acted as a “feeder” to their Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane services. We borrowed money from the bank to get started and I remember very well loosing lots of sleep worrying about the $280 per month repayments, little did I know that within two years the repayments were more like $4,000 and four years over $10,000 per month.
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We were reasonably busy immediately and I recall only one trip where we didn’t have any passengers but we always had freight. I had set up a depot system in every town we passed through and it was a big “cash cow”. On the morning of our first trip Bob Sandow turned up at our office with a VW Kombi full of Pavlovas for Mildura and for ten years we carried them nearly every trip. There were other regular freight forwarders and we carried lots of toilets and hand basins, evaporative air conditioning “bats”, one tonne gearboxes in specially built trailers for the Broken Hill mines happened monthly, fire extinguishers, so much freight that often passengers luggage was carried inside the bus. It became clear within a few months that a bigger bus was required and we bought a new Hino 28 seater and an enclosed tandem trailer. At our first Christmas we scheduled additional services and had to borrow a 57 seat coach from Deluxe.
Dennis and I lived above our office which was very centrally located in Albury. The tax rules were very different then and as we lived “onsite’ everything (including alcohol) was paid for by the business as well as the “Entertainment Allowance” which took us to the best restaurants in Albury and surrounds and we often had trouble remembering who should be paying but it didn’t matter as the cost was fully tax deductable to the business. For over two years we didn’t have any need to take wages from the business.
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We had Deluxe Mini Buses parked out front of the office, Deluxe fares on the window and all Deluxe services stopped at our office as well and it didn’t take long for word to get out that we were the people from whom you bought your bus ticket (we sold Greyhound tickets as well). In the early days one of us would be driving the bus to Mildura (some 10 hours) and the other would be running the office. The office was busy and we would be banking many thousands of dollars every week, some weeks we had to go to the bank every day as bus travel and package holidays were big sellers. We had a reputation for success and often other Travel Agencies would point people in our direction when they were unable to obtain the required bus seats. We had the connections within Deluxe and if we were having trouble getting seats for example on the very popular Albury to Surfers Paradise (Deluxe ran two coaches together every night) we would call Bob who was an old mate and Manager of the Melbourne office (and as this was pre computers) he would get his eraser and rub out existing names and write our passengers names onto the card.
Deluxe were fantastic to us, we put heaps of business their way as well, not only in ticket sales and feeding them passengers from Mildura but arranging lots of coach charters. If we needed a coach and they had one sitting around (they had around 150 ) we could use it for free as long as Denis or I drove it. I organised a Mildura promotion in Canberra and Sydney and Deluxe gave me their newest coach (about a week old) for over a week at no cost. They were very impressed to see their coach sitting in Martin Place in Sydney and Civic in Canberra in places they wouldn’t have thought possible. If we needed any sort of assistance with air conditioning or whatever we could get it done at the Wangaratta base and we never got charged for it. When Deluxe Coachlines went “pop” five or so years later we closed our office and operated from our service base in South Albury.
We had arranged the timetable so that Wednesday was free for vehicle servicing which I did myself. Most of the work I did was regular servicing and I was fastidious with things like tappets and injectors and I proved to myself that “oil was cheap” changing oil and filters more frequently than the manufacturer recommended resulting in much longer life for the component parts. In ten years we didn’t have much mechanical trouble on the road and it happened mainly when we did I was driving. One Saturday at around 1.00pm I broke a rocker shaft in the Volvo but I was able to drive on to Kerang, pull it out, weld it up at a place that was a regular freight customer, replace it and continue on arriving into Mildura on time. Volvo didn’t have a spare in Australia and they flew two out from Europe and gave them to us. The Scania had a very complicated gear changing system and just short of Shepparton I could only select about 50% of the gears so I got on the phone to a workshop for whom we often carried freight and they were waiting at the Railway Station with a box of “circlips” and it took me around 30 minutes to replace two broken clips in the gear selecting mechanism (this was two days before we settled the sale of the business). Major repairs were rare with the gear box on the Toyota requiring new bearings after 35,000km, pistons and liners for the Volvo after 500,000km and a sincro ring for the main Scania at around 750,000km.
After a few years V/LINE the Victorian Governments Transport system approached us and we started to operate under their banner. It took some time to settle into the new arrangement but after about twelve months we had converted them to our way of thinking, they were mind blowingly dumb and one example was where it took me months to convince them not to close the bookings on their computer once the bus had left the first station, as it turns out they did this on all their trains as well and by the time we had finished all V/Line services had a “live” booking system which allowed passengers to buy a ticket at anytime prior to departure. We had long discussions over the number of seats on our buses and who would sell them, we finally arrived at an arrangement whereby V/Line sold 40 and we sold the rest and I am here to tell you we sold as many as we could and took NO notice of our allocated number and we did find ourselves fitting three kids to a double seat and having people sitting in the Drivers bunk area. The service grew to the point that on an average day we carried around 100 people (and heaps of freight).
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It wasn’t all plain sailing with V/Line, after three months I went to Melbourne and meet with the CEO and we discussed the payment amount we received into our bank account on the first of each month. They used the “average’ & “mean” system and I used the value of the travel coupons we had pulled from the actual tickets system and guess what, my number was 50% more than theirs and it swung on a knifes’ edge for a few minutes before they decided to increase our payment by 50%. On another occasion I was summonsed to Melbourne to meet with the CEO because I had been removing people who smoked on the bus, we gave lots of warnings over the P.A., there were NO SMOKING stickers all over the place and a warning of a Smoke Detector in the toilet area and there were no ash trays. I would just stop, invite the offender to join me outside the bus and then I would drive off and leave them standing on the side of the road. So I am in this office high up in Collins St Melbourne and the CEO is going ballistic, I sat there calmly until he was finished and once I had asked him if he was finished I produced our contract agreement which I pointed out had his signature at the bottom and in the “blerb’ it said that this was “A Non Smoking Service”! I went on to point out to him that we had $260,000 tied up in each vehicle which I had purchased to suit the contracted application and it was my name on the side of the bus as the Registered Owner and if he couldn’t control his passengers then I surely would. I learnt a valuable lesson about Bureaucrats that they can’t handle hard facts and if you have truth on your side, go for them!
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Partnerships are difficult things, look at marriage for example. I was desperate for my partnership with Dennis to succeed and I learned very early that I had to play to Dennis’s likes and my strengths. Dennis liked not to have to “stress” too much but he did assist with decision making and I kept him up to date and in the loop. I think he was happy to see me busy and as a rule he supported me. We didn’t take wages for the first two years but after that the money started to flow, Dennis got married and had a daughter and I invested most of mine. When I did get married I drove back from Mildura on the Friday, got married on the Saturday in Benalla, went for a short honeymoon on a house boat in Mildura returning on Friday and drove the bus to Mildura on the Saturday! I wasn’t sure I trusted Dennis to be in charge for any longer than that.
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In 1986 after wearing out a Toyota Coaster, A Hino 28 seater and a 45 seat Volvo we ordered our first Five Star Tri Axle Coach it cost us $245,000 and around $4,500 per month in repayments (more lost sleep) but we discovered several markets that we were unaware of the first being local 5 Star Charter, then V/Line used us for second services on their Albury/Canberra and Albury/Adelaide routes and we made an absolute fortune doing train breakdown replacements for NSW State Rail. NSW State rail requested we tender our coach charter rates to which they said “you must be joking” as I had doubled the normal rate. Within one week they were on the phone looking for coaches and nearly every week thereafter we would get at least one trip Albury/ Melbourne or Albury/Sydney, it got to a point that I turned down all other charter work. Around two years later we bought another 5 Star tri Axle Scania Coach at Auction for $90,000 (more repayments!) and I spent two weeks getting it up to our standard before it left our yard. It turned out to be a very reliable workhorse and made us lots of money.
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We had very good service from our Scania Coaches, the first we bought new and drove for 1,200,000km (when we sold the business it did another 400,000km and it was then traded back to Scania who promptly sold it to someone in New Zealand) and the second around 400,000 trouble free km. These were both the K112 11 litre six cylinder turbo bolted to a ten speed gearbox (five speed with splitter). With 305 hp they were a dream to operate but they did need to be correctly maintained and that means tappets every 100,000km and injector service every 200,000km and I shortened the oil service period down by 30% to every 20,000km. It was reasonably common to see Scanias of all sizes towed into the Albury Workshop with destroyed motors because operators didn’t adjust the tappets, apart from the loss in performance, the valve guides would wear oval and a valve would break off and go through the Turbo and back into the motor.
Our first Scania was fitted with a CAG (computer assisted gearchange) system which meant that the gear box was the standard ten speed but a computer controlled what gear was selected when you put your foot on the clutch pedal. Scania imported quite a few of these into the country without really having the required level of technical backup and at one point I had more idea of how this system worked than Scania did and they consulted me on occasions and sent coaches to me for repairs and advice. The system was simple enough but setting up the sensors was tricky and the system required perfectly clean/dry air and of course most Australian operators overlooked the air drier when it came to servicing. Basically you got the benefit of Automatic operation with Manual performance, on our Albury-Mildura run we would get consistently 12 mpg cruising at 100km/hr at 1,500rpm with loads of torque (as it turned out I could do the trip with 30 litres of fuel less than the other drivers, I guess that is because I was paying for the fuel).
In the ten years of this business I used all the experience I had gained overseas. I recall my father in the 70’s asking me “where is this leading to” as he followed my exploits overseas but unfortunately he didn’t live to see the result. I am convinced that anybody could make money in the 80’s (it is much, much more difficult today) but I think Dennis and I surprised plenty of people when they saw two young blokes set up a business from scratch, obtain capital to buy and operate fantastic equipment at a high level and impress Dysons Buslines so much that they purchased the business from us on July 1st, 1992.
My wife and I headed off almost immediately overseas for three months, UK, Europe and the US. I thought we had plenty of money but was shocked by the cost of most things and I didn’t feel any better off than I was in the 70’s. Driving around the UK was fun, Europe seemed very congested and the US hadn’t changed much, my old mate Tony Church was now in charge at Trek America (twelve years later) and my old drinking partner Lou Hockel jnr was the top Trek operator! We visited Keith and Monika Charlesworth at their Motel in Roswell New Mexico where Ellen discovered she was pregnant and our lives were never the same again.
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