Michael Castaldi's "Paradise Express" 2003 Peterbilt 379 and 2010 Utility 3000R were voted by Overdrive readers as the 2024 Pride & Polish Working Combo champ.Photos courtesy of Michael Castaldi
Florida-based owner-operator Michael Castaldi has owned just three trucks since getting his own authority back in 1986.
After high school, he worked at a truck wash in Rhode Island, where he lived at the time, for about six to eight months. His father knew the foreman in the shop of a White Motor Company dealership in Rhode Island, who then got him a job working there in the shop. He stayed there, learning plenty, for the next two and a half years.
In 1983 when Castaldi turned 21, he hopped behind the wheel as a driver for a small fleet owner he'd worked with in that White shop. He hauled air freight out to California and back. As a 21-year-old fresh into trucking, Castaldi lucked out in piloting some of the best of the best in equipment -- his assigned truck was a Peterbilt 359.
“Here you are, 21 years old, and this is everything you could dream of,” Castaldi said. “Red, white and blue paint scheme, double bunk, 3406B Cat, I mean, top of the top. And you’re a kid driving it for next to nothing, but you were just glad to be in it.”
He stayed in that job through 1986, when in December that year Castaldi bought his own truck -- a 1987 Peterbilt 359 Classic that he regrets selling to this day. With only 359 of the Classic models built in that last year of the iconic model’s run, his was No. 319.
He ran it up through 1992, when he bought a Peterbilt 379 with a 310-inch wheelbase and sent it to Double Eagle, where he had a 120-inch sleeper installed. He added new stacks, lights on the cab, and plenty more. “You didn’t have quite the stuff you have today to put on a truck,” he said, “but for what they had, I was putting it on.”
His current truck was his next purchase, a 2003 Peterbilt 379, the deal inked in August 2002. He ran it for about nine years with the factory 260-inch wheelbase and 63-inch sleeper. Then in November 2011, he pulled it off the road and had it built into the truck it is today.
The work he put into the truck then, and the effort he’s put into it since to keep it in pristine condition, led Overdrive readers to vote the truck and its matched Utility reefer as 2024 Pride & Polish Working Combo champ.
[Related: Best of the best: 2024 Pride & Polish champs revealed]
A major upgrade in Indiana
In 2011, Castaldi took the truck up to now-closed S&J Truck Sales in Indiana. At the time, S&J performed a lot of the frame stretches for custom sleeper companies in the area. The owner stretched the '03 379 out to 320 inches and put a 132-inch ARI Legacy sleeper on it.
The ARI sleeper on Castaldi's 379, shown here and in the next photo, features all the comforts of home.
A full repainting, too, put a white base on the truck with black stripes and magenta edging around the stripes. The scheme was inspired by an old Peterbilt 359 job that was available in the 1980s from the factory, and it matched the scheme he had on the 2010 Utility 3000R reefer trailer he'd bought the year prior. The magenta edging around the stripes, he said, delivered on a desire "to have a little more pizzazz” on the truck.
“I had the stripes put on the trailer knowing exactly what I was going to do to the truck when I got that done,” he said. “And then once the truck was [in the shop], we just measured the stripes off the trailer right onto the truck with a straight line so we painted them even. They matched right up, and that’s how that part of it came together.”
[Related: Third-gen owner-operator Rafael Gonzales' 1984 Peterbilt 359, 'Goldie']
The truck was originally mostly plain white with some small striping. Castaldi chose white from the factory because, being based in Florida, it doesn't absorb as much heat as darker colors, like his jet-black 359 Classic he had owned earlier in his career. Today, his reefer work mostly takes him from Florida out to Arizona and back for direct customers, so that white base has continued to pay off.
He’s been making that run in some form or fashion since 2008, initially running all the way to California for several years, leading to the truck’s “Paradise Express” moniker.
"I just figured, what’s nicer than either end" of those runs? he said. "I mean, you get on that end, it’s nice -- Arizona, California. You get on this end, you’re in Florida, it’s nice. So I said, you know, both ends of this run are paradise, and this is the truck that runs back and forth, so that’s the name. Going West, it’s going toward paradise, if it’s going east, it’s going toward paradise.”
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but this one might could be summed up in two: "Paradise Express."
Cosmetically, the truck is about right where he wants it, Castaldi said -- no plans for big changes in the near future other than to continue to keep the unit in veritable show-worthy condition. Yet he’s quick to note the 379's no typical show truck. He’s been hauling with it for more than 22 years, now just shy of 3.3 million miles on the odometer for an average of about 150,000 miles a year. For the last decade, he’s been running team with his son, Michael Jr.
Ever the astute owner, Castaldi is meticulous about not just appearance but maintenance. Paradise Express is on her fourth engine -- all Series 60 Detroits. He pulls them right at a million miles, what he calls a "precautionary thing. ... You can get a catastrophic failure that you don’t see coming.” As a small business owner, he “can’t take that chance,” he added.
The first engine came out in 2008 with 1.01 million on it, the second in 2015 at 1.025 million. The third hit 1.035M in 2022, all of them sold to a friend who has a 35-or-so-truck fleet that exclusively runs Series 60s. They rebuild them for their power units.
Castaldi has also added custom touches to the engine with chrome valve covers, intake and more.
The only other major mechanical change he’s made to the 379 came in 2017, when his rear end housings started to show their age with cracking and other issues. He completely replaced the housings and turned the truck into a 6x2 rather than a 6x4. That helped him on weight, too, offsetting some of the gains he took on with the big-bunk setup.
Swapping the housings cut about 440 pounds from the rear axles, he said.
[Related: Small-fleet owner's 379 Legacy a Limited Mileage beauty]
