Kelly’s Hero

In-depth

3 Feb

Let That Midnight Special…. Shine a Light on Me.

Leo Kelly lives at Edenhope near Horsham but spent the night before the Koroit Convoy at his daughter’s home at Ballarat to ensure he wouldn’t miss his joining in from Colac on. “It’s a day out and don’t we all need that!”

Leo’s Kenworth W900, ‘Midnight Special’ is well known around Victorian truck shows as well as further afield. Having bought the truck in 1984 Leo sold it in 1992 – the year after it won Truckin’ Life’s Rig of the Year.

But let us go back to the beginning ….

Born near Ballarat, Leo ran Melbourne/Adelaide for 18 years, carting wool over and talcum powder back. “It was my own truck but I was working for an old girl in Adelaide - Mrs Venn. She ran a business called Ringwood’s Transport. She was about 80 then and boy was she savvy! It had originally been her father and brother’s business and she had run it for some 40 years.

“I started with a 3070 ACCO and then an Atkinson with an 892 in it which I traded in on the Midnight Special. This was $1500 a month to pay off and it was the easiest thing I ever did because it just never stopped. It would do three runs one week and two the next and it never let me down.”

“Well it did once at 700,000km when it dropped a valve. It used to go that good that I’d never ever let anyone tune it up and I should have. It’s a CAT motor and I should have had the valves set but I thought I’d let no-one stuff around with it and that came back to burn me - literally.”

Leo sold the truck with about 1½ million kilometres on the clock to go farming. The truck was his deposit on the land. “I was getting sick of being on the road. The farm meant sleeping in my own bed at night so I got into feedlot and cattle which I’m still doing to this day.”

But that W900 was never far from Leo’s thoughts and his regret at having sold it intensified over the years. “That truck was never far from my thoughts and I finally decided that I’d buy another W900 and recreate it. Then, after 22 years my son came to me and said he’d found it! A mate of his in Adelaide had come across it. I went to the owner and asked if he was willing to sell it. He was – for $70,000!

“I’d sold it for $100,000 and thought $70K was a bit rich after 22 years, so I declined. One year later he came back to me with a price of $40,000 – still a bit high given the state it was in, but sentimentality hey?

“I stripped it back to bare bones and had Barry Dixon at Cobram repaint it in her original colours and put a lot of other stuff back in it. I went to Kenworth and they were able to supply and fit all the interior upholstery and new seat covers. I simply told them the model, they put it into their computer and voila, they spat it out. Amazing really. It also lifted the truck’s interior as I’d originally ordered it with the ‘poverty pack’.”

An interesting aside is that Leo’s truck which had won Castlemaine’s Rig of the Show back in 1990, also won it again just after he had recovered it. Not a bad effort some 24 years apart. Leo continues to take Midnight Special on the rounds and said nothing was going to keep him from the convoy after a year of standing idle. If the convoy had awards, we suspect Leo could’ve added one more to his bulging trophy cabinet.