100 and Counting for Caterpillar

This year iconic machinery manufacturer Caterpillar will reach its 100th anniversary. The official date for this milestone will be April 15th and no doubt it will also be celebrated during the Bauma trade fair in that month, and during other events worldwide throughout the year.

The Holt Manufacturing Company and the C.L. Best Tractor Co. merged to form what was then known as the Caterpillar Tractor Co. in 1925. From the company’s first track-type tractor designed to pull combine harvesters in Northern California to autonomous construction and mining equipment and engines that power the world today.

This announcement got me thinking about my own personal engagement with Caterpillar machines over the years, of which there have been too many to mention, but I thought I would cover some highlights in this blog post.

As a young child whose father was involved in the construction machinery operating world, I was often exposed to Caterpillar machines. For me personally it was the number one iconic brand and my bedroom wall was plastered with posters of Cat products in addition to other famous manufacturers.

I would often write to the dealers back then most notably Bowmaker and H Leverton (now Finning UK & Ireland) requesting brochures for a school project, and to my delight I would often receive a Cat baseball cap with the equally iconic Pacman style logo on it, just great memories!

As I have documented many times previously from the age of 12, I used to accompany my late father to work on the M27 south coast motorway project in Hampshire on the weekends, during a 3-year hire that he was on there. It was on this job that I got to see a lot of Caterpillar equipment including, legendary dozers such as the D9G, D8H, D6C and D5, I also witnessed 627 motor scrapers, the likes of which I had never seen in real life beforehand, this just heightened my enthusiasm for all things construction machinery related going forward.

Later during my working life, I went on to operate numerous Caterpillar machines, mainly excavators, mini excavators and the occasional backhoe loader, including 212BFT wheeled excavator and 225DLC both for James King Plant in Northampton.

I later also spent time operating a very tidy second-hand Cat 312B hydraulic excavator for contractor and plant hirer MJ. Troup, on a housing site development in Devon.

Having drifted into the media world on a part-time basis in 2008 when I first started this blog platform, many opportunities followed to work with the Caterpillar brand.

My first visit to Caterpillars Learning and Demonstration centre in Malaga, Spain took place in 2011, where I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to fulfil a lifelong ambition to drive a Cat 627G motor scraper in addition to getting a shift on the then new Cat D8T dozer.

As part of my work as a freelance correspondent for Earthmovers Magazine from 2013, there have been many more visits to Malaga for numerous machine launch events, with the last one being in 2019. Post Covid such Cat events have not readily become available to me, but we hope to be back in the future.

Interestingly enough, as part of the 100-year celebration Caterpillar will be commemorating the milestone by offering some limited-edition machines throughout 2025 painted in “Centennial Grey” which was the original colour of Cat machines in the early days, before they adopted the yellow livery in 1931.

This reminded me of a blog post we did in 2021 about an Australian contractor who had two of his new excavators painted with some grey livery in respect of the old Cat livery, you can read that post here.

Its going to be an interesting year for Caterpillar, and one I’m looking forward to immensely.

Checkout this fascinating video about a contractor who has a vast private collection of Caterpillar classic tractors.