Type of Business: Transportation

Wright-Knox Motor Lines, Inc., a transportation service, maintains a successful business due to several interlaced factors.  We provide an excellent service in the truckload industry, at reasonable rates, for a small group of solid, long-standing customers.  Our base is performance and trust developed by daily contact with shippers and management.  Dedication to superior maintenance of our fleet ensures customers deliveries are on time and they can be proud of the delivery service to their customers.

Banks Wright, entrepreneur, began life in 1924 as son of a college educated teacher/farmer.  He wanted no part of farming or school; at seventeen he joined the Army, worked in the motor pool in the Philippines, and went to Japan as the first occupying force after the Hiroshima event.  Banks thoroughly enjoyed mechanics and it became the driving force in his lifetime achievement, Wright Motor Lines, Inc.  Upon returning as a WWII veteran, he began driving trucks; worked in tire maintenance with Navajo Freight, dispatched with Daniels Motor Freight, Jones Motors and B & P Motor Express.  During this time period, he owned, maintained and rebuilt his own tractors.  Banks also was a vivacious reader of history, union, business biography and political books forming the base on which he built his businesses.

Banks’ first sole proprietorship was a trash collection business purchased for $10,000 in 1969 consisting of an old dump truck and small landfill.  Banks built the sanitation company to a 20,000 customer base, partnered with another local sanitation service for the purpose of developing a state of the art landfill.  The business was sold in 1992 for $3.75 million to Chambers Development.   During the development of this company, Banks continued his job as dispatcher, but anticipated the deregulation of trucking, and in 1982 he obtained common carrier authority from the government to open his own trucking company.   

Banks believed good equipment was key to a successful trucking operation and preventive maintenance was the base for good equipment.  He put that theory to the test beginning with one tractor-trailer and the establishment of Wright Motor Lines, Inc.   The money gleaned from the sanitation company during the 1980’s supported Wright Motor Lines, Inc.  Banks built the first group of trucks from glider kits; eventually he was able to purchase used equipment, 5 trucks at a time, then 10.  Two mechanics, personally trained by Banks, maintained the sanitation and Wright tractors and trailer simultaneously and remain with Wright today.  

In 1995, after convincing daughter Gladys, with much help from his son-in-law, Jerry, to take over the Presidency, Banks began preparing for the next generation of management.  Fearing the maintenance team might find difficulty maintaining a growing fleet with used vehicles, he decided to test the financial ability of the company to buy new trucks, thus the first 10 new trucks rolled into our lot in 1996.  Prior to this time, Banks maintained a very low to zero debt in the company.  Banks set a buying pattern of 10 trucks every 18 months, paid off in 18 months, and 10 new trailers every year, paid for in cash.  (We maintain that system today, with a slight increase in trailer numbers as necessary.)  Since that time we have purchased a combination of new and used tractors, depending on the market and EPA regulations affecting newer engines.  We typically run equipment past 1.2 million miles (debt free for 8 of the 10 year cycle) before resale which results in lower operating costs, proving Banks’ theory is correct.  It is the belief by which all our mechanics labor.