Page 394 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

A FRONT ROW SEAT—TOMMY VANLANDINGHAM
“I saw my first Quad in 1966,” recalled Tommy VanLandingham, one of the early Quad D9 operators, before his passing in 2018. “The first time I actually operated one was May 1967. At the time, I was working for Kiewit doing interstate projects in New Mex- ico. I was just a punk kid of 22.” VanLandingham spent 50 years running heavy equip- ment and construction projects for Kiewit, Granite, and other big contractors, mostly up in Alaska. He was one of the few operators who ran a Quad in its early years. Hav- ing grown up on a farm, he was quite comfortable around machinery so picking up the new air-over-hydraulic controls was just one more challenge. “I just climbed up there and figured it out. There were hardly any operators who knew the Quad then, so I was in pretty high demand. The contractors would contact me, and I’d either go demon-
strate a Quad for them or work for them for a couple of months until we could get somebody else trained.”
VanLandingham only got to see a Buster Peterson-built Quad in pictures, but he operated a number of Caterpillar’s early units, even before they were officially DD9Gs. “Buster and Caterpillar were in the developmental stages in New Mexico when I was there, and then over at the proving ground in Arizona. Caterpillar came out a lot when they were running tests; there’d be all kinds of factory reps standing on the banks taking notes.”
In those early years, VanLandingham spent a lot of time on the Quads. “It got to be where there was such team- work between the scraper operators and the Quad, it was like a great basketball team where everybody works in sync. We moved three or four million yards of material on some of those jobs. Those were fun times.” What made the Quads stand out, besides their obvious power, was the finesse of the controls. Once you learned them, you could put those D9s in a tight turn and do donuts all day long with ease. “The big thing about the Quads was the controls. You had air and hydraulics. And you ran both your feet. It was just learning the patience to put the valves in the correct position to make it turn. That was so much different than a conventional piece of equipment. The con- ventional Cats and the other manufacturers all used levers. But the Quads came out with air-over-hydraulics. And that made everything so much easier to run.”
During the 1970s, VanLandingham operated Kiewit’s Quad No.79 up in Alaska—the same Quad Peterson bought in 2012. And later, as a job superintendent for Wilder Construction, he used No.79 on the Alaska Railroad Realignment project in 2001. “One time I pushed 600 loads in a ten-hour shift,” recalled VanLandingham. “There was always
a big competition between operators to see who could push out the most loads in a shift. A quad would be 10-15 seconds faster getting hooked up to a scraper than two separate Cats because you only had one operator. From
the time I touched them until I pushed them out, it was 15-18 seconds. With separate pushers, it was a minute, a minute thirty, a minute forty-five. It was unbelievable what that machine could do compared to what we’d used in the past. The production they were getting with those Quad 9s just went off the scales. It’s hard to put into words. Unbelievable.”
Tommy VanLandingham died in February 2018 while still employed as a job superintendent for Granite in Alaska. “Tommy was on the very first job Kiewit had that quad on [No.79],” says Randy Krieg, a friend and colleague for over 25 years. “He wasn’t running it at the time; he was running a scraper and being pushed by it. He’d been around that quad for years. Tommy loved dirt-moving, and that’s why he kept doing it well into his seventies.”
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