With a background in mechanical engineering, Alex Stables arrived in Australia as a £10 migrant and worked in development of retail petrol pumps before moving his career at a nuts and bolts manufacturer in Sydney. He decided to move on when the company consolidated its offices and closed the doors of its New South Wales location, joining Comalco Aluminium in their newly formed Highgate Engineers division. For 10 years, he gave the materials supplier a voice that could discuss the benefits of aluminium over steel with their transport company clientele, being at the forefront of introducing aluminium to the industry. With that move, Alex’s 49-year career in the transport industry was sealed. “Though I came into the industry by default, once I was a part of it, I loved it,” Alex says. “It’s diverse, challenging and it’s different every day, so I’ve loved every minute of it.”
In 1985, Alex took his knowledge of aluminium road tankers and joined up with a small Brisbane family business called Holmwood, creating the national tanker specialist business, Holmwood Highgate. Together, Alex Stables and Colin Mellish built the business, facilitating natural growth and expansion alongside that of the transport industry to become what Alex calls ‘a force in the tanker market’.
Initially the Holmwood Highgate engineering team was very small, so Alex and Colin did most of the development themselves. In those days, before systems like Computer Aided Design (CAD) were invented, everything was done by hand and they went through reams of paper. The first tankers included tri-axle and tandem semi-trailers, and the first B-doubles were built in around 1988 – initially known as reverse B-doubles.
The company started building products for rural distribution, creating a B-double combination that could leave a city with maximum payload on highway work, then split into two semi-trailers for local farm delivery. “That was an innovative design at the time, requiring new technicalities like sliding suspensions and slip-in pumps,” Alex recalls. “It was a solid design that works, and is something we have recently revisited and modernised with new efficient building techniques for use today.”
While his background in aluminium helped shaped the way Holmwood Highgate designs tankers for minimum downtime, as well as a piece of simple advice that Alex received when first starting in the transport industry: ‘it’s not the cost of the repair, it’s the time off the road that will kill you’. As such, Holmwood Highgate tankers are designed and manufactured in Australia, the barrels in Brisbane and fitted out at the Melbourne and Brisbane workshops to be the height of reliability, Alex says. “Without a doubt, Holmwood tankers have the best track record for reliability. Once you have one of our tankers on the road you don’t take it off. We are proud that our tankers are so reliable that many of our early 80s customers are still loyal today. Both families have succession in place with sons working in the businesses to ensure a continuation of the story.”
This Industry Icon article was first published on trailermag.com.au