Mt. Vernon, Missouri-based Robert Forsyth, trucking today at 72 years old under his own authority as R.J.F. Express, has been behind the wheel of a truck since he was able to obtain a chauffer’s license in New Brunswick, Canada, where he grew up.
At just 16 years old, Forsyth followed his father’s footsteps into the logging business and hauled logs for a few years. At 21, he left New Brunswick for Western Canada for a spell.
He came to the United States in 1984 after an employer “put a bond up to get me over so I can go to work,” then he got his permanent residence card, got married, and the rest is history. Forsyth met his future wife, Joyce, at a restaurant when he was hauling for a company based in Missouri. They’ve been married 35 years as of this month.
“She understood that I ran to California and back to Buffalo, New York, every week,” he said. “Sometimes take 10 days to make a turn, sometimes you can turn it in about seven days. She knew that I would be home one night a week.”
He was driving for Southwest Missouri Transit out of Purdy, Missouri, at the time. They changed names to Artic Coastal Transports, but “things kind of went south from there,” leading to Forsyth purchasing his first truck in the mid-‘90s.
He went to hauling refrigerated freight, leasing on with Clarksville Refrigerated Lines (CRL) in Clarksville, Arkansas, which handled grocery deliveries for Walmart at the time. He built the company up to four trucks, and on July 31, 1996, got his own authority as R.J.F. Express, transitioning power units one at a time.
Growth up to eight trucks over the next decade surely yielded no small amount of satisfaction for the small fleet owner. Yet he came to see his preferences and value as a one-man operation clearly.
“To tell you the truth, I make more money and I sleep better every night with just one truck than what I did when I had eight.” --Owner-operator Robert Forsyth
Robert Forsyth
Working with the Peterbilt dealership in Springfield, Missouri, he again took his time and sold power units back one at a time, giving his drivers opportunity to find other work.
By 2007, he was back where he started, yet with plenty experience and authority from which to pull. R.J.F. has been one-man, one-truck ever since.
Today he's got a principal freight partner in broker Falcon Transportation, with refrigerated chicken outbound from Arkansas to Lewiston, Maine, then French fries back from McCain Foods in Easton, Maine, to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He runs those lanes roughly twice a month like clockwork.
Breaking up the monotony, a deal with two farms in Maine has him moving ice generators and cooling tubes back and forth between Maine and Florida/Georgia twice annually in early summer southbound, again in October to bring them back to Maine.
Forsyth gets the nod as Overdrive’s Trucker of the Month for September, putting him in the running for the Trucker of the Year award.
Forsyth joins fellow Truckers of the Month in competition for Overdrive's 2026 Trucker of the Year award.
[Related: Owner-op's push past near-disaster to 35 years, 6M-plus miles]
Business decision toward independence
When owner-operator Robert Forsyth decided to hang out his shingle with authority in 1996, his motivation was less personal than business.
Leased to Walmart contractor CRL, he and his drivers at the arrangement's peak could count on a steady 3,500 miles a week. Work slowed over time to 2,100-2,500 miles, and “you’d sit around here with a new Peterbilt," as he put it. "I had four trucks there -- had one Freightliner and three Peterbilts" he was making payments on.
Finance companies, banks weren't keen to "change the payments because your deal went south a little bit," he said. He worked with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association on the authority filings at the time with a mind to build better business.
He did what he knew to start -- working through brokers and shippers he'd hauled for with other companies through the years.
And “I just kept working at it," he said, ultimately finding his bread was buttered best with Falcon "out of Presque Isle, Maine -- they’ve got an agent here in Arkansas. And they have the French fry deal coming back to Fort Worth.”
Forsyth operates by the "Service is my business" motto, shown here on a coffee mug, one he'll gift to a deserving customer or prospect time to time.
His dedicated runs today for Falcon keep communication simple -- he lets all parties know when he’s leaving to pick up in Arkansas and when he’ll be available to reload in Maine.
When he's there, he makes a stop at the D&L Carlisle & Sons shop to “have my truck gone through from bumper to bumper,” he said. “If anything’s leaking or if I’m down on oil or down on antifreeze, they fix it for me, they get it right. Same thing for my reefer unit. I do that every trip” with diligence, key to avoiding OTR downtime.
It happens, though, as any owner-operator knows. An account with Michelin makes for a quick replacement when one of his 22.5s goes down, he said.
Forsyth's 2022 Peterbilt 389 sits on a 280-inch wheelbase. The rig’s equipped with a 565-hp Cummins with an 18 speed and 3.23 rears. The 2015 Great Dane reefer he bought new and has pulled with since August 2014.
“I guess you would say I take a lot of pride in my ride,” he said. He makes sure with the trailer that he doesn’t load anything that will damage the trailer walls “because I don’t want a trailer all patched up inside or scratched up outside.”
The Peterbilt, he noted, is among the last that was built with a full range of gauges rather than having a digital dash.
[Related: Idaho produce hauler's 2023 Peterbilt 389X]
He's been in a truck-trade cycle of roughly 400K-500K miles, but “I just don’t like this new 589 Peterbilt,” he said. His truck today has around 530,000 miles on it, and for now he'll hold on to it a while longer.
Turbulent times, steady hand
He hooks to one or another deck trailer a few times a year to haul ice generators (shown here) and cooling tubes from Maine down to Georgia and Florida and back.
Forsyth keeps close eye on fuel-price trends, negotiating increases in his rate when needed.
“Everybody has worked with me so far,” he said of his customers during the big run-up in diesel prices of late.
He's found value in revolving lines of credit through Love’s and Irving Oil that get paid weekly by his wife, Joyce, who “runs the checkbook,” he said. The money’s always there to make the payments, he noted, but the credit gives him the flexibility to spend what’s needed when.
Looking at the year so far, he’s on track to be profitable “only because I brought my rate up as the fuel came up,” he said. His customers “understand because they’re buying fuel every day themselves.”
Forsyth keeps his 389 cruising between 65 and 70 mph, something of a sweet spot both for his fuel bill and overall maintenance, he said. “I don’t want to have to be putting wheel bearings and airbags and all this in every time I turn around,” he said. Not only that, but keeping it below 70 gives more opportunity to control the truck if something goes wrong, he added.
He’s getting about 6.5 miles per gallon with the rig, which he’s happy with given how it’s spec’d.
[Related: Close look: How Trucker of the Year hits 10.5 mpg with '19 Freightliner mods, operations]
Those aforementioned oversize cooling tubes are on their own trailer, which he hooks to in early summer to haul south, then again in the fall to bring back north.
Forsyth’s best advice for new or aspiring owner-operators is to cut out the middlemen as best you can. Too many hands in the proverbial cookie jar shrink profits in a hurry.
“I would try to get with somebody that was an older broker, and … there’s a lot of them out there, a little guy that can pay you every trip,” he said. Traditionally, as a “truck broker was designed," as Forsyth put it, "he had a customer that he ... got trucks to haul [for] them, but he had the money in the bank to pay that truck as soon as he turned his bills in.”
Stay away from the extra middleman all too common in today's brokered-freight world, he advised, forwarders and other entities “that are calling up a broker” and asking if they need help finding a truck any given day. “Stay away from those people because they ain’t gonna pay you,” Forsyth said.
At 72 years old today and with 8 or 9 million miles in the rearview, Forsyth said he’s told the farmers he hauls for he plans to keep going until he’s 75, but “as long as my health stays good, I will stay and play the violin. ... I’ll stay as long as I can. As long as my eyesight don’t go or I don’t have to get no more internal work done, I’ll be all right.”
[Related: How owner-ops dodge shady brokers, ensuring freight's paid when due]
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