Profile: Calvin Jones, 2017 Wall of Fame recipient

We talk to a Tasmanian transport pioneer who was honoured at the 2017 Road Transport Hall of Fame inductions

The grandson of a Tasmanian Bullock team driver, it was perhaps inevitable that Calvin “Bimbo” Jones would end up following in his father Royce’s footsteps and join the transport industry.

Calvin was completely shocked in receiving the nomination to join the coveted Wall of Fame at the celebration yesterday morning (August 26) held at the Road Transport Hall of Fame, in Alice Springs.

“Earlier the week before, my wife Susanne had led me to believe we were going to watch Collingwood play Melbourne at the MCG then celebrate my daughter’s birthday,” Calvin explained.

“Honestly I thought they were taking me on a girl’s shopping weekend… when we arrived at Melbourne Airport and they said we were catching another plane to Alice Springs for the weekend I began to wonder what was going on.”

Like many transport pioneers, Calvin’s introduction into transport industry was driven more by the necessity to earn a wage and carve out an existence at an early age rather thabn revel in the glamour and romance of travel.

Wind the clock back to the late sixties, and picture a young teenage boy propped in the driver’s seat of a ten-yard tipper in the steep Northeast Tasmanian logging country. He can barely see over the steering wheel, the truck’s owner sticks an old army slouch hat on his head to make him look a little older, and then sends him off down a dirt track with his first load of gravel. That was Calvin “Bimbo” Jones’ introduction into the road transport industry.

A few years later, Calvin had barely turned 18. Now he’s at the wheel of a 1973 single-drive Cummins-powered International D-Series hooked to a bogy-axle trailer. He’s hauling his first load of general freight from Melbourne to Sydney for Lanes.

That truck might be second-hand, but right then the rig was much more than just a young man’s pride and joy. It was his ride to the future, although at that moment he’s probably not exactly sure where the ride’s heading. That Inter was his greatest risk because back then, $4200 was a lot of money to spend on anything, not least a venture with a precarious grip on certainty.

Whether he bothered to think about the risk or even permitted himself to think much further into the future than getting that load up the Hume highway to Sydney, from then on, trucks and the timber industry were locked permanently into Bimbo’s life.

However, his passion for his family and community back home saw him return to Northeast Tasmania after 12 months of interstate, where he became a founding member of the local Crows football club. He played for the team up until he was 50 and today still sponsors the team donating all the football jumpers.

A little over four decades later, the transport company CR & S Jones, he formed with his wife Susanne has transformed to become one of the prominent timber haulage companies in the state.

Yet it hasn’t been an easy road, it’s had more than its fair share of corrugations too. In July 1992 they purchased a general freight run from Scottsdale to Launceston consisting of two rigid trucks building the business up to include two semi trailers and forklifts.

Along with the acquisition of the new business and contracts with corporate clients, Bimbo had for the first time started using his given name.

His older brother Max, who could not pronounce Calvin, had dubbed him Bimbo since birth. At that time, singer Jim Reeves’ song Bimbo was a hit on the radio and story goes that Max picked it up from there.

Eight years later, they sold the general freight run to concentrate on bulk timber product distribution and services with the addition of their first walking-floor chip bin.

Today their fleet consists of four Western Stars with three specialised walking-floors, two flat-tops and one curtain-sider concentrate on delivering products from the last remaining sawmill in the Northeast district.

During the milling process of converting round logs into sawn rectangular boards and beams, excess material is generated in off-cuts and sawdust, which is often referred to as ‘woody biomass’.

“A decade or so back, all of this was fed into the mill’s fire-pit and burnt,” Calvin explained.

Toda,y thanks to operators like Calvin this former waste is now a sought-after product that has numerous uses. One of the most popular is that of animal bedding, such as that used by racehorse stables which is largely due to the fact it is one hundred percent natural and highly absorbent.

Calvin takes the raw-sawdust and offcuts to his processing facility where it’s graded and de-dusted to produce an all-natural absorbent bedding material. Other uses for the woody biomass include smoking sawdust and shavings used for smoking meats, seafood and cheese. It is also used as an absorbent soaking material in a range of industrial cleaning purposes including cleaning oil and chemical spills. If you’ll pardon the pun, Calvin’s chipping-in to save the environment.

When quizzed on the biggest changes he’s seen in the industry, Calvin pauses for a moment recollecting a lifetime of transformation.

“The efficiency and reliability of the equipment is one of the better changes,” Calvin said. “We’ve worked hard over the past few years to gain accreditation for fatigue management, mass management and maintenance management, which ensures we’re meeting the industry compliance standards. It’s all these things, which make the industry and us more professional.

It’s now close to 45 years since that young Bimbo Jones hauled his first load of sawn timber out of a North East Tasmanian sawmill.

He has a sharp eye for detail and quick wit leaving no doubt of the energetic character smouldering close under the skin, he’s a man who spends life looking more through the windscreen than the mirrors.

Listening to Tasmania Talks on the morning radio where Bimbo is a regular, you quickly realise that matters like the impact of government regulation, industry unity and commercial opportunity run far more fluid in his mindset than trips down memory lane.

However, passing on his experience to the younger generation of aspiring drivers to ensure the transport industry has a strong future is close to his heart.

Instilling his drive, skills, business ethics and generosity into the transport industry is legacy that cannot go unnoticed.

Congratulations to Calvin and all the nominees to the Wall of Fame.