Neil Weber has been in the transport industry for over four decades, through good times and what he calls ‘the dark days’. 

He’s helped keep logging trailers on the road, created innovative solutions, increased safety and even given us an All Black - and for that, he’s a Southpac legend.

Unlike many in the industry, Neil Weber can’t claim to come from a long list of truckies, however, he did get the truck driving bug early.

“My late father [Graham Weber] was actually a farmer but we always had a farm truck to do hay and stuff like that, so I was driving trucks when I was about 9 or 10 years old. And you know how farmers are on a farm, they’re pretty innovative too.” 

Currently 57, Weber says that he left school in 1980 and took a diesel mechanic apprenticeship in the Port of Napier before making the switch to the road freight industry.  

“In ‘87 I bought my own truck and became an owner driver for an outfit called Trident, a consortium of five freight companies. I was an around town truckie, driving a Mitsubishi four-wheeler.” 

He was on the road for around three years when the company asked him to undertake a transport management role.  

“They asked me to run the place due to some illness with the incumbent. I did that for about a year and then in ‘91 a new position came up at Pan Pac which I was successful in getting.  I was a transport manager under the wood resources manager Brian Pritchard, a fine old gentleman who unfortunately after retiring, died having been hit on a pedestrian crossing.” 

Weber says that at the time at Pan Pac they had a fleet of about thirty owner drivers and eleven company trucks.  

“They were mainly Macks and White Road Boss’s, all Caterpillar powered loggers. Part of my role in ‘92 was to do a fleet upgrade and we actually did the trip over to the USA to sort out what engine’s we might want to look at for these new trucks. We were one of the first to get the electronic redhead Cummins in a NZ logging fleet. 

He says the first three trucks were K100e Kenworth’s and the other eight were Foden’s due to ‘the exchange rate making them cheaper’.

In 1997 Pan Pac became a fully ‘owner-driver’ fleet. “We offered the trucks to the wage drivers and some of them did take it up. When I left in 2014 there were probably around 75 trucks in the fleet and they were a massive Kenworth flavour, especially when the T659 came out which is a perfect New Zealand logger in my view.”

As part of his role in Pan Pac Weber managed the log yard, however in 2013 they put it out to tender. Weber says that one of the interested parties was ISO Limited. 

“They [ISO] got awarded the contract and I was very impressed with what they did in a very short amount of time. In early 2014 they knocked on my door and asked if I’d be interested in taking a GM/Business development job with them.”

Weber recalls that the timing was right for him but that it was ‘hard core’ to leave Pan Pac, not only because of the role but also because he had become the NPC Manager at Hawke’s Bay rugby. 

“In 09 they [Hawkes Bay Rugby] asked me if I would cover them for that season. I managed to arrange that through my boss, and it went very well for all parties, and I ended up doing that for 5 years. I had to finish that when I moved to Tauranga. But also, that year [2014] my young fella [Brad Weber] made the Chiefs, and of course Tauranga is closer to Hamilton so that was also part of the decision-making process.”

Weber says that at that time the family-owned (becoming Australian owned by Qube in 2017) ISO only had a small truck fleet of eleven. Adding that ISO started off as a stevedoring company in 1995 and then grew into lots of other things, including transport ‘as a necessity to grow’.

“Within a year I also took on the log marshalling part of the business and that kept me bloody busy. I started four new log marshalling ports [Marsden Point, New Plymouth, Wellington and Gisborne] in a period of about one year. From scratch, green field’s stuff.” 

He put in a management team, established all staff, got new equipment, log handling loaders, materials handlers, wharf trailers and terminal tractors ‘all that stuff’.  

“It was massively challenging, it was pretty tough, probably put years on my life. But we got it done and the company is now the dominant player in the market.” 

Weber says that part of his role is business development and around 2019 he approached Warwick Wilshier to see if he had any interest in selling his Gisborne business PHL (Pacific Haulage Limited).  

“He has built that business up to around one hundred log trucks and to cut a long story short we bought it and took over on the 6th of January 2021. Interestingly enough, pretty much all those trucks are Kenworth’s, probably the biggest Kenworth fleet in New Zealand.”

Weber says that they were six-hundred staff in 2014 and are about eleven hundred now. 

“I’ve been fortunate enough to bring a lot of technology into the business, in the log marshalling side in particular. ISO now does robotic scaling, and we recently bought six new harbour cranes into New Zealand that load the ship.”

Weber reckons that he has a real drive to do better than what we’ve been doing through implementation of technology, upskilling of people, better equipment and also just trying different things.

A good example of that lately came with the log marshalling. Weber says that there’s a lot of short-distance shuffling of logs and they were struggling to get drivers particularly because of the amount of activity for chain throwing.

“It’s fine when you’re doing long haul, but when you’re doing a 2km trip and trying to do 20 loads a day it was proving almost impossible and the safety risk/ shoulder injuries was huge.”

He says that he put his innovation hat on and came up with a log bin system.  

“I worked with the Log Transport Safety Council and in particular Warwick Wilshier. We did a prototype made out of normal container flat racks and proved the concept. The log is fully enclosed in the cage and there’s a side opening where the loader goes in and lifts the wood out. The driver doesn’t do any real physical activity other than check his load before he goes on to the public road.”

They got the sign off by the police and the LTSC supported it.  

“Now we do all of our log shuttles in Tauranga (and just started in Napier), where we’re shuttling high volumes of logs over short distances and the drivers are loving it. It’s a lot more appealing, it’s safer for the driver and ‘as safe’ for the public.”

Weber says that this innovation has been created with Patchells.  

“Patchells have always built all of my log gear since 1991 and they were the ones I went to for this project. Now they are building me four new ones that can take two packets inside the bin.”

The log bin solution extends further, as they are now using them for Pan Pac’s pulp transport business.

“Those Super B units have the log bins that are on twist locks like containers. They come off in the early hours of the morning and the pulp bins go on. It takes about six minutes to change the bins over which are modified shipping containers with the curtain on one side of them. We’re now running at 60-tonne on logs and pulp 24hrs a day, 5 1/2 days a week in Napier.”

Weber believes in ‘safety first’ and says that that can bring with it some innovation, productivity and be a better way to do things. But ‘making the job safer for our people is number one’. A position demonstrated by his involvement with the Log Transport Safety Council. 

“I was on the founding committee of the LTSC back in the early 90s”

He says that back then the industry had a real problem with rolling loggers, “so many trailers per week that it wasn’t funny.”  Adding that there was no representative organisation, and that it was very disjointed.  

“Warwick Wilshier in particular drove the establishment of the LTSC which I became a member of straight away and was on the committee with. We battled hard believe it or not to keep trailers on the road because the government representative’s solution was to just ban log truck trailers. We rapidly put a lot of things in place that kept the industry on the road. We brought in things like SRT’s, better trailer design and driver education. I was in amongst that for 10 + years.”

Weber says that the group was enormously dominated by the Central North Island operators ‘because that’s where most of the kilometres get burnt up’ but also the industry was growing around the country and that in turn probably contributed to the rollovers. 

“because we were now operating in areas that weren’t the best roads and were struggling for operators, so there was a bit of a bad recipe there for potential disaster.”

He says that the only fortunate thing out of that is that he can’t remember any serious injuries from any of those crashes because generally speaking they were on lowly populated vehicle roads. 

“So single vehicle rollovers, very rarely, were any other vehicle involved. But it was a really dark time for the industry.”

Trucking as such may not have been passed down through the Weber generations, however, it would appear that rugby has. Not only did Neil play for Hawkes Bay but his father Graham played and his three children [two boys, one girl] have also played - with Brad Weber now playing for both the Chiefs and the All Blacks.

“Brad is a tiny wee fella, only 75kg, so to be successful when you’re that small is not easy.  Like his Grandad and myself, Brad plays half-back, number 9. He started with the Chiefs in 2014 and played his hundredth game last weekend where he scored 2 tries. He had his first game for the All Blacks in 2015, and then again in 2019 and has been there ever since.” 

Brad is 31 years old, and Neil reckons that he’s at his peak. “His current target is to keep playing for the Chiefs and win a Super Rugby final, but the World Cup is next year in France and that’s one of his targets too. Then he’ll see what happens.”

Neil’s future seems just as focussed. He says the industry is hugely challenging, vibrant and innovation is still coming for them ‘we’re not sitting on our hands’. He says that they’re really enjoying the Bay of Plenty area and that ‘they’ll just carry on doing what they’re doing’.

ISO may be a part of a big Australian listed company, but Weber isn’t looking to cross the ditch.

“I have no desire in living in Australia, the rugby team isn’t good enough for starters.”