Every day about 70,000 tractor-trailer trucks cart all manner of stuff on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but it's a pretty good bet that yesterday only one contained an 11,000-pound bull elephant.

Jackson, the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium's prolifically propagative pachyderm, made the 2 1/2-hour road trip to his new, more expansive, permanent digs in Somerset County aboard an 18-wheeler with specially reinforced ceiling and sides.

Tracy Gray, a zoo spokeswoman, said the 29-year-old African elephant's trip to the zoo's International Conservation Center was uneventful, without even a rest stop.

"He's happy. There were no stops and no problems," Ms. Gray said.

One reason is that Jackson likes to go on trips. Before arriving at the zoo in 1994, he was a circus elephant and traveled regularly. And in 2000 he caught a ride to the Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida, before returning to Pittsburgh in 2002. The same animal hauling company that moved Jackson to and from Florida moved him to Somerset yesterday.

After the truck arrived at the ICC, Jackson was led out of the trailer and into his new home in a recently constructed elephant barn.

"We will keep him in one stall at first and give him some time to acclimate," Willie Theison, zoo elephant manager, said. "I will be there so he has someone he knows and is comfortable with."

Jackson is the first elephant to arrive at the ICC, Ms. Gray said. Eventually he will have the run of an exercise and grazing area of more than five acres.

Sometime next spring, the Philadelphia Zoo will send two of its female African elephants, Bette and Kallie, to the Conservation Center to breed.

Jackson has fathered five calves at the Pittsburgh Zoo, including Angelina and Zuri born this year, two more while at Disney in Florida, and two others through artificial insemination.

Dr. Barbara Baker, the zoo's president and chief executive officer, said the Conservation Center is the first breeding facility in the nation run by an Association of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited zoo to focus on the propagation of the African elephant.

"With the ICC," she said, "we will play a major role in addressing the need to increase successful reproduction in the African elephant population in North America and develop a national program for training managers and keepers to provide the best care possible for these magnificent animals."