January’s Truck of the Month: How to Fillmore Truck

CLAIRVILLE, NB — This maroon 2003 Pete 379 is a 625-hp testament to a trucker’s sense of pride.

The rig belongs to Clairville, N.B.,-based owner-operator Donnie Fillmore Sr., who founded and is now contracted to Atlantic Pacific Transport Ltd.

The new boss at Atlantic Pacific Trucking is also Donnie Fillmore. He’s the son of the man who owns the truck and he’s also the chairman of the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association, (APTA).  He supplied us with these photos and told us that his earliest memories involved getting up Saturday mornings to take a cloth to the fenders on whatever truck his dad was driving.

“He’d be home Friday and on Saturday mornings we’d clean the truck so it’d be ready for when he left Sunday,” Fillmore says.

As young Donnie grew, so grew Atlantic Pacific. They now run 40 mostly heavy-haul or oversized loads across the continent.  

But unit 60, the one in these photographs, has a special calling. Donnie Sr., purchased it 10 years ago in North Carolina; and it was loaded, with hardwood floors,  a fridge;  laptop, 18-speed transmission; full leather interior; and complete gauge display.

Comments Fillmore Jr.,“That truck doesn’t get driven in the winter, ever.”

To Fillmore, that is emblematic of the way the fleet rolls. His father, like his carpenter grandfather before him, is an assiduous detail man who believes that attention to detail and appearance breeds prosperity.

“If you talk to anybody in Atlantic Canada who knows my father, that’s probably the one thing that they’ll tell you – his stuff had to be just so. It was always clean; always polished.”

“We promote pride in your equipment. We feel there’s a benefit for our customers.

I also know we benefit when I’m talking to my staff and we prove to them that it’s about pride and being recognized for what you do and doing the right thing.”

“Customers sure notice that attention to detail and I think it pays off at inspection time; when you come in with a clean truck and a logbook that’s all in order; that gets you noticed. And the competition definitely notices when your trucks are shiny.”

Fillmore also pointed out that clean vehicles stand out from the pack even more vividly in rural areas.  “In the city, clean vehicles don’t stand out that much, but out in the country, where there are lots of dirt roads, people stand up and pay attention when they see a shiny new-looking truck like this.”

But even Fillmore concedes that a 2003 with only 240,000 miles on its C16 Cat engine is a tad impractical.  On the other hand, he says that speaks to the very human element that seems to permeate the trucking industry. 

For one thing, trucking runs in families in more ways than one. Donnie Sr. had three brothers, Allan, Daryl and Neil, and they all grew up to be drivers.

Plus, no matter how serious the business, there’s something about trucking that appeals to the kid in all of us.

“The boys,” Fillmore says, “still love their toys, that’s for sure.”

Truck of the Month Club

Do you have a truck that deserves to be immortalized?  

We want to know about it.

Maybe the truck you want to show off is a showpiece. Or a restored masterpiece.  Maybe it’s a workhorse with seven figures on the odometer or perhaps it’s a custom-built  one-of-a-kind without which some important element of Canada’s vast infrastructure wouldn’t have been possible. Or maybe your truck was involved in some life-saving adventure while being piloted by a brave driver.

We will be searching the country over the next few months for topnotch candidates and between now and year’s end, we will be pounding the social media for input, likes, dislikes, comments, retweets and favorites. Come December, we will be declaring one of the candidates Truck of The Year. 

Why? For the same reason Donnie Fillmore keeps that Pete off the highways during the winter. Because we love our trucks, that’s for sure.


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