My earliest impression of PIE was in the early 1950s. I was raised in El Sobrante, CA a few blocks from what is now the I-80/Hilltop Drive on and off ramps. My father is buried in the cemetery that can be seen from the freeway. I used to play in the gullies and fields where that massive cut and fill project was made -- more earth was moved in the San Pablo -- Carquinez Strait section of I-80 than for the Panama Canal. We used to play in those gullies until the kids from the Rollingwood Subdivision below us used to shoot at us with their 22s -- we only had BB guns -- fortunately the gullies were transected by lots of subgullies (I doubt that "subgullies" or gullies within gullies is an approved geological term). Before I-80 was built, folks traveled East (but first north to Donner Pass) on Highway 40. Hilltop Drive (then County Road 24) terminated at the old Highway 40. In those days Highway 40 and San Pablo Avenue were the same roadway. The termination was on a grade known far and wide as "Tank Farm Hill" as Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) had tanks all over the hills feeding or receiving product from its refinery at Point Richmond. When going to and from Richmond for groceries, church, whatever, we headed nominally west on County Road 24 and nominally south down Highway 40. The SOCal refinery supplied much of the fuel to Northern California, Southern Oregon, and Nevada. So there was a constant stream of tankers (mostly truck and trailers and mostly PIE) traversing Tank Farm Hill. That hill was a tough climb for those old 150s and 200s some of which had chain drive and all of which drug (what kid would have used the word "dragged" when "drug" has a better sound and that was in the days before drugs seemingly became a recreational necessity) chains to discharge static electricity. So to a kid from El Sobrante, PIE was lots of fun, particularly at night. We got the noise from the straining engines, the sparks from the chains dragging the ground, and the flames from the stacks (no turbos in those days).
Somewhere around the first of second quarters of 1967 I drove for the PIE tanker operation out of its San Pablo (or Richmond, the boundaries were somewhere around that location) yard. Some vice president in its national headquarters in Oakland wanted to make me a boss in Salt Lake City or Houston for less pay than a driver. PIE wouldn't give me the 13th shift that would have made me a permanent employee under the Tanker Supplement to the National Master Freight Agreement. But as mentioned in a prior post, I was at P.I.E. long enough to find some driver's interpretation of P.I.E.: Power Isn't Everything. I got the hint so I hired on at the Consolidated Freightways tanker operation out of Martinez. PIE must have been a big player in those days. Before I drove for PIE or CF or so many other tanker lashups in those days, I did a stint as a rate clerk for Mitchell Brothers Truck Lines. Mitchell Brothers participated in the Pacific Intermountain Tariff which was probably centered at PIE. Of course that was when truck freight was regulated by the ICC.
Mitchell Brothers was a proud outfit. It had about the best looking fleet of flats on the road; its lease operators had the prettiest and most powerful rigs of any flat/lowboy outfit (Southern Tank Lines followed closely by Western Highway Oil had the prettiest tankers). Now all you see of Mitchell Brothers are a bunch of scroungy looking trucks around PDX. I don't understand why that proud outfit had to go down the tubes; perhaps the brothers saw deregulation coming. Deregulation of freight may have benefited the national economy but I think us truckers paid for those benefits. But this is not to advocate a return to truck freight regulation; I haven't studied that subject sufficiently to form an opinion about returning to "the good old days."