McGRATH TRAILERS AND COMPANY HISTORY.

I have a 1956 Phone book at home, these are the ads for McGrath- There are two ads, but the interesting thing is that there appears to be TWO McGrath's trailers, in melbourne alone?
Wonder if it was a bit like the Haines Hunter thing, company was sold but the original owner isn't happy, and starts again or similar?
Any ideas?
Cheers
Richard
P.S pretty good place to build and sell Semi Trailers, on the corner of City Rd and Calrendon St in Melbourne eh?

HI ALL,
Thanks to 48bedford, some of the Mcgrath advertisments are now up on the forum, something i am unable to achieve.
Does anyone have more information about the McGRATH Trailers built for Johansan ?
And just to clear the air, the McGRATH trailers began in 1929, then just after the second world war, J.J. McGRATH sold his very successful business to a new company FREIGHTERS, in 1946, who made him an offer he could not refuse.
McGRATH trailers continued as a subsidiary of FREIGHTERS, producing FREIGHTER-McGRATH trailers, however J.J. McGRATH would recommence building trailers, more on that later.
J.J.McGRATH built and designed the first trailer, we now know as the baby Quin, however it was FREIGHTERS who named it the baby Quin, and marketed it as such, also more on that later.
regards BILL.

B tween fone calls eye'm take n a boo peep @ the Freighter patents ( bout 50 patents )
Looks like
Licensed By Trailmobile International Inc. Panama
a Sunsidiary of Trailmobile Inc USA
Manufactured in Australia by
Freighter Industries Pty Ltd
Cya
[ch9787]

The Johhanssen?? trailers were built under the Freighter name.

Without checking - I think they were 45ft bogie bogie self tracking units.

Freighter copied and refined what Johanssen had already made and then went on to build 4 more for Vestys to pull behind their Rotinoffs. All about 1957ish.

I think when Mr McGrath started up again (after prev selling to Freighter) his trailers/bodies etc carried the McGrath name and Freighter dropped using McGrath and went over to just using Freighter as their brand name.

Oldfulla

Well I don't no Mcgrath Freighter we all can guess which or what I seem to recall reading some Johansen leased his trailers to vestys when they were getting started but I dunno ??? Lot's of you all a lot smarter than me

www.hcvc.com.au/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1264847727

MrsMP & All

Yes - it all gets a bit confusing - and hopefuly when the history is written things might come more clear.

Just reading the Johannsen book (A Son of the Red Centre) - he says he had his first (out sourced) bogie bogie self tracking trailers built by 'McGraths' in Melbourne in 1948. Whether McGrath were owned by Freighter (parent Coy) by then I'm not sure without re-reading some of the above contributions.

And as someone suggested - there are photo(s) of Vestys Rotinoffs 'testing' 2 of Johansenns trailers - however it doesnt tell whether they were Kurts own builds or his McGrath builds - however they are the single wheeled version.

But that is contridicted in the Vesty history by Liz Martin - which says (in 1957) the 2 Rotinoffs were delivered from the ship to Freighter Industrys (Sydney) to have bodies built - and then on to Melbourne (no mention to who) to collect their trailers - which had been buit to essentally Johannsens design. So how or when the Rotinoffs got to tow the Johannsen trailers remains a question.

Having said that - the Rotinoffs were trialed at some stage with 3 dogs - so the extra 2 may have been 'borrowed' from Kurt and the photo been taken when they were being collected from the Alice????

So I'm not sure what all that means - other than to guess that Freighter operated under both the Freighter and McGrath names until JJ McGrath got back into the business and reclaimed the McGrath branding as a different beast to what was being made during the time between when he first sold to Freighter and when he restarted.

Either way it seems the Johannsen type trailer was a product of the Freighter owned McGrath Coy.

All the above being a SWAG - Sientific Wild A$#e Guess.

Oldfulla

One of the things I did notice after looking at the last post of mine is that the Mcgrath trailers of Johansen only have one set of doors for each trailer and the freighter add I put up earlier had three doors and the body truck had two which leads me to agree that the trailers for vestys as may well have Johansen but under freighter name I dunno I'm proberly wrong but? And Johansens only had doors on one side and also you can clearly see Johansens trailers behind Vestys trucks