Be the first to write a review.
Big Jim Transport Legend Book. Complied by Clive Lind & Beverley Barker & published in 2023.
Big Jim: Transport Legend tells the story of how a lad from Pukemiro, a Waikato coal mining town that no longer exists, built a nationwide trucking and shipping business and changed New Zealand’s transport industry forever.
Told through the eyes of his wife Bev who joined him on the journey, Big Jim is about a man who never said can’t and his vision, perseverance and determination to always find a better way to do things.
When banking proved too poorly paid and lucrative coal mining proved too dangerous, Jim and Bev set out with his sister Cynthia and brother-in-law Dennis Dow and bought a tired road transport company and its six dilapidated trucks in Otorohanga in 1963.
Over the next half-century, he expanded the transport and allied businesses far beyond Otorohanga. When New Zealand Rail and its Cook Strait ferry monopoly notorious for intransigent unions and industrial stoppages blocked his way, he created his own shipping service. “You’re crazy”, he was told. “Look at all those who have failed”. But with the right people, Strait Shipping, first carrying livestock and commercial freight and later through a passenger and vehicle ferry service, under the BlueBridge brand, was an immediate success based on a simple premise – ‘we’ll be nice to people’. This soft back book is new & unused. It is 210mm wide & 295mm high & 274 pages.