For a while, it looked like Jake Friesen was growing old sleeper cabs on his Manitoba farm. Hulking, unwanted bunks were popping up everywhere, complete with cubbies and curtains. Friesen recently harvested a bunch and unloaded them to tractor builders in Mexico. Another batch, he scrapped. “Yeah, the sleepers are gone,” says the president of Load Line Manufacturing in Winkler, Man. “We’re back to normal.”

For Friesen, normal is the business of disassembling highway tractors and rebuilding them as straight trucks for grain or gravel. (Hence all the sleepers scattered around the joint.) Converting long-and-tall highway tractors is a growth market for Friesen, who bought Load Line 15 years ago to supplement the family ag biz. At the time, the company built just grain boxes for trucks. Friesen needed a power unit for his farm and modified a highway tractor.

A neighbour saw his handiwork and asked for one. That’s how Friesen arrived in this new market. Back then Load Line had a workforce of six. Friesen now oversees 62 employees who do about 300 tractor conversions a year. Load Line’s rise to prominence as a re-builder of trucks for farm use has coincided with a surge in the use of trucks by farmers, who formerly relied on elevator storage and rail lines for transporting their grain. But with the demise of rail subsidies and elevators, many farmers have become medium- to short-haul truckers.

At any given time, Load Line has about 100 trucks in various states of surgery. Friesen’s mechanics, machinists, and other technicians–to whom Friesen attributes his company’s success–remove fifth wheels, extend frames and drive shafts, rip off sleepers, adapt drive axles, and install grain boxes on to these erstwhile highway rigs. The process takes four or five days and each unit is safety certified. Once complete, Load Line’s grain trucks sell for about $30,000 compared to up to $120,000 for a new hauler.

There’s no shortage of used sleeper-equipped tractors, especially around Winnipeg, home to some of Canada’s biggest truckload fleets. Most of the rigs Load Line buys are five to 13 years old. “The average used truck is in a lot better shape than it used to be,” Friesen says. “There’s much more plastic now, not much rust, and guys take better care of them.”
High miles aren’t an issue. “A long-haul trucker may put on a thousand miles in a day,” he says. “A farmer might put on 3,000 miles in a year.”

A typical purchase? “That’d be a 1996 T600 Kenworth with a 10-speed transmission and a 40,000- or 42,000-pound rear end,” Friesen suggests. “Maybe 400 horsepower.”

Customers call in orders from as far away as the southern United States and Russia and points between. “We’re not the only one doing this conversion,” Friesen says, “but we’re the only ones to do the whole operation–including painting–right on the premises. Plus we offer a full six-month warranty on all our trucks.”

Most of the work is now done in the new 25,000 square-foot factory. But some is still carried out near the old Friesen farm. Which brings us back to the sleeper units. What happens to those tractors that have integrated sleepers, the kind that don’t come off easily? Friesen says that he will, if the farmer wants, install a barrier behind the cab to cut off access.

Or, there’s always the option of having a farm truck with a sleeper. Who knows when that might come in handy?