Visiting the recent ‘Hug a Rig’ family fun day held at the Southern Field Days grounds in Waimumu, we stumbled across this extremely tidy example of the mighty Freightliner Argosy, and thought, ‘thats got to be a million miler’, and it is.

The mid-roof, 90in sleeper cab, tractor unit is proudly owned and operated by Dunedin-based Alastair Dick of Kiwi Road.

A true South Island truck, the big Argosy was put on the road new in early 2016 by Eric Gillian of Dunedin to service a Foodstuffs distribution run with TSI. According to CARJAM’s detailed records, it shows that the Freightliner was in Eric’s care for nearly five years, pulling a quad-axle refrigerated semi-trailer.

“Apparently, at around 1,200,000km on the clock, Eric gave it quite a birthday. The DD15 was completely rebuilt and so was the transmission as well,” Alastair told us.

The tractor unit was on-sold to Summerland Express Freight from Cromwell not long after this, and remained in its factory-finished TSI white. Summerland added the two-tone green stripes to the white cab, complete with its branding. JPJ685 continued to serve well for its new owners, with normal maintenance work and running repairs for a truck of this age. In the latter half of 2022, ownership of JPJ685 naturally swapped over to Booths Transport when it purchased the Summerland business. At this time JPJ685 had reached just under 1,700,000km.

Midway through 2024, with just over 1,800,000km recorded, JPJ685 was placed up for sale. At this time, Alastair was looking for a solid project truck with good bones. Stumbling across JPJ685, Alastair had found what he was looking for. He struck a deal and the truck had a new home.

“It was in reasonably good, straight condition when I purchased it, just needing a bit of cosmetic work really. Dave Ching of Skoda’s Trucking Solutions was a fantastic help here, helping to find all sorts of bits and pieces that I needed for it. I’m very thankful for his assistance.

“Hard case though, ol’ Fulton Hogan tore up our road to do roadworks just after we got it, so I had to park it a block away from home. This became a real pain in the ass when I wanted to work on it. It meant I had to drag everything down the road to it, I even had my wife, Josie, dragging new guards and the like down the road for me. Then, when you went to get going, you’d find that you had forgotten something. Yeah, that was definitely a challenge.

“There are a few more things that I would like to do, as time allows, but it has tidied up well. In fact, it took out the best Freightliner award at the 2025 Dunedin Truck Show. So, yeah, not a bad effort for it.”

Future plans for JPJ685 look productive as well. “I am running the truck within my company, Kiwi Road, and will be working it. It’s not all about shows and cruising about, she’s still most definitely a working truck. There will be many more productive miles go on the clock yet,” Alastair says. So if anyone out there has a task that they feel is up JPJ685’s alley, then get on the blower and give Alastair a call. In the meantime, we say welcome to the club JPJ685, a stellar performance thus far.