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The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio
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4 days ago
A plan to not just survive -- but thrive -- through the bottom of the freight market
"If you do what you've always done, you will only get what you've always gotten." --Kevin Rutherford
Reticence to change has been the downfall of many a life, and many a business. Small fleets and owner-operators aren’t exempt, of course. If you recognize the name after the quote here, you’re probably not alone among Overdrive Radio listeners and Overdrive readers who’ve taken motivation from Rutherford in the past. The longtime radio host is a past contributor to Overdrive who found his particular, singular talent for motivating and helping owner-operators in part through decades-past appearances in early installments of Partners in Business seminar series at the Mid-America Trucking Show.
Since, Rutherford’s been a lot: in addition to a radio host a fitness and wellness coach, writer, owner-operator business advice man and group leader and more.
But he started back in the 1980s just like so many here. One man, with one truck, and an ability to learn from mistakes made.
This Overdrive Radio podcast drops into Rutherford’s story as he told it several weeks back now to attendees of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies’ annual conference here in Nashville.
His mission that evening was to walk attendees through a plan to solidify the business base to take advantage of opportunities at the market's bottom to excel for long-term trucking at the top. Rutherford’s plan may be simple-sounding, but it's plenty complicated and variable in the execution. And he's a real pro at delivering it and making any trucking business owner think hard about how, and why, you do what you do.
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Nov 17, 2023
Homer Hogg's top 5 diesel fault codes: At No. 1, emissions issues that you can do something about
At the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies a couple weeks back in Nashville, TA Petro Truck Service VP Homer Hogg presented results from his analysis of recent-history fault codes seen by the three leading all-model diagnostic equipment providers. He analyzed codes data to determine the five biggest parts of the trucks those codes were related to.
At No. 1, probably no surprise, were aftertreatment-related codes, and his talk featured here then provided an informative look at persnickety emissions systems in 2010 and later trucks -- with actionable steps owner-operators and small fleets can take to guard against some of the most common issues seen.
Among the recommendations he makes:
**When the dashboard lights up, don’t clear those codes. Techs need them to properly diagnose any issue.
**Clean the DEF doser once a year, at least.
**Change your DEF filter according to manufacturer-recommended intervals.
**Keep a “clean room” approach around the DEF tank, particularly when you’re pumping the fluid.
**Keep SCR-system efficiency tests in mind to periodically examine it to prevent NOx sensor failures.
**Most importantly, perhaps, don’t fall for the "delete kit" trap, if you want qualified mechanics to be able to help you work issues out.
Other helpful emissions-related coverage: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15066117/emissions-maintenance-how-to-get-the-correct-diagnosis-repair
https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15290372/how-to-delete-emissions-issues-without-breaking-the-bank
https://www.overdriveonline.com/maintenance/article/15540134/fuel-treatments-becoming-part-of-owneroperators-pm-routine
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Nov 10, 2023
Small fleets find a way: 2023 challenges, from slowdown to recruiting, equipment devaluation, more
This edition of Overdrive Radio features a special spotlight of sorts on what a wild and wooly year it’s been -- for everyone is some way, that's sure, yet no less for Overdrive’s 2023 Small Fleet Champs.
As was noted up top of our previous podcast, last week at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies’ annual conference we recognized four finalists as well as several other past semi-finalists, finalists and champs in attendance. Ahead of the presentation Thursday, November 2, Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills sat down with this year’s four contenders with a particular topic of discussion in mind.
That's the biggest challenges each fleet had faced throughout the year so far, and just what steps they'd taken to address the difficulties, from freight slowdowns from lynchpin customers in some instances to pressure on rates from customers, too, and recruiting struggles, equipment devaluation concerns and more.
Featured herein are:
Champs in the 3-10-truck division:
**Bill Barhite, owner of Silt, Colorado-based Butterfly Xpress: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15546088/butterfly-xpress-offers-big-benefits-as-a-small-fleet
**Larry Wallace, owner of Henrico, Virginia-headquartered Wallace and Sons Transport: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15544008/wallace-sons-transports-bakery-residuals-trucking-niche
And in the 11-30-truck division:
**Adam Johnson, K&D Transport owner out of Spring Valley, Wisconsin: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15544771/kd-transport-owner-in-the-groove-with-thirdgen-flatbed-fleet
**Larry Limp, owner of LNL Trucking of Bedford, Indiana: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15546199/lnl-trucking-stands-on-strong-financial-foundation-to-thrive
More profiles of Overdrive's Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists in addition to the final four: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ
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Nov 6, 2023
Owner-operator John Schiltz's top-notch team with business and life partner: Trucker of the Month
Today on the podcast we’re featuring Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole’s talk with October Trucker of the Month John Schiltz, nominated for the Overdrive 2023 Trucker of the Year award by his wife and now fully-minted, CDL-holding business partner, Sarah Schiltz: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15637523/owneroperator-john-schiltz-a-keen-eye-on-maintenance
The pair run a two-truck fleet as a team and pull alongside each other in a pair of Kenworths (a 1999 W9 and a 2013 T660) running fresh vegetables to canning operations in the Midwest during harvest season, flatbed and RGN platform freight much of the rest of the year. You can probably guess just what they’ve been up to in recent times out of their Wisconsin home base as vegetable harvests wrap up.
What emerges from this talk with both John and Sarah, though John officially gets the Trucker of the Month nod, is a spotlight on the teamwork it truly takes to excel as an owner-operator business. John’s quick to credit Sarah with a large part of his recent-years’ success, buttoning up the biz to where it is today.
More from the Trucker of the Year program this past year: http://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year
Find all Overdrive Radio episodes featuring 10 Truckers of the Month for 2023 via this playlist: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/overdrives-2023-trucker-of-the
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Oct 27, 2023
Without accessible power, battery-electric Class 8 trucks don't stand a chance, even in drayage
That's the message in a certain way of the very existence of companies like Forum Mobility, around for just a couple years as a vehicle-charging-services and equipment leasing company. Company regional director Ron Hunt leads the podcast with that very notion, sounding like many an owner-operator in wait-and-see mode around electric-drive tech and battery-charging-infrastructure development. Hunt’s a veteran of the trucking world who got involved with electric-truck start-up Xos Trucks some time back. Yet what he learned led him to the charging-infrastructure side, in part given absolutely huge barriers that exist to any widespread adoption of electric Class 8s.
On October 25 we published the anchor story in a series around electric-drive-power realities, in which Alex Lockie unveiled and contextualized Overdrive readers’ views on the current state of electrification as it relates the specific needs of their mostly OTR businesses: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15544337/teslas-semi-may-blow-past-diesels-uphill-but-truckers-see-limits
Putting it quite succinctly, here’s how one owner-operator commenter in some ways summed up current views on the nature of quite literally all battery-electric Class 8 technology as it relates to bedrock operational feasibility OTR: "It's not going to work, the power grid can't handle it, and the trucks don't go far enough on a charge."
Hunt and his colleagues at the Forum Mobility company aim to help on the grid front, and well realize any “electric revolution” will be a good long time in coming to trucking, even port drayage where they're specializing.
It is certainly growing fast if electric Class 8 tractors running in California still only number in the low three digits, Ron Hunt emphasized. Port drayage in the state is where those units are most prominent, for good reason. The California Air Resources Board has done everything it can to really make the market there, with an end-of-year deadline for dray haulers to register their diesels within CARB’s system. And as of the first of the year, if lawsuits don’t derail this particular deadline (a little more on that in the podcast, and here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15636769/california-trucking-association-seeks-injunction-of-diesel-truck-ban ), any truck registered to work California ports must be a “zero emissions vehicle” – we’ll use that ZEV shorthand a bit, though no manufactured product in today’s world is truly “zero emissions."
Forum Mobility is aiming nonetheless to be a power provider with subscription-based charging access to sites in both Southern and Northern California specifically built with drayage trucks in mind. They’re also combining electric truck-lease services with those charging-power subscriptions for those who want to pursue that kind of model, as they build a planned six facilities over the next couple years. Today on the podcast, excerpts from a talk with Ron Hunt and two other Forum reps about how the business got its start and just where it’s planning to go to serve drayage haulers in California, and beyond.
Another related element of the series is this feature about Hight Logistics, Forum Mobility's partner small fleet now running five electric trucks in SoCal ports leased through Forum: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15546421/small-fleet-owner-predicts-longterm-roi-with-batteryelectric
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Oct 20, 2023
'Trucking Legends': New podcast charts 70-year career of Ken Greff
Nashville, Tennessee-based Ken Greff in this edition of Overdrive Radio tells the tale of the early years of his 70-year trucking career in and around trucking, much of it spent in truck sales in Tennessee. Yet Greff got his start behind the wheel far away from the U.S. Southeast in Western Canada, driving and owning trucks in a variety of operations.
The podcast excerpts the first edition of a new effort by host and McMahon Truck Centers sales rep Corey Price, who lives due East of Nashville near Cookeville, Tennessee.
Price interviewed Greff for the first episode of what he’s calling, simply, “Trucking Legends,” an old-school-trucking podcast he envisions as a repository for preserving the stories of those who’ve been in the business going way back. Spotify link to the show is here, but you can find it via most podcast platforms: https://open.spotify.com/show/03I3nAD4uLhcCPAMSpdqmZ
Corey Price has known Greff since his days as lead man in the Music City chapter of the American Truck Historical Society, and Greff served as a sales mentor to him when he took his first truck-sales job at an International dealer in Cookeville. Along the way, Price, a truck and trucking history enthusiast since he was a kid, got to know Greff’s past a good bit better -- it stretches all the way back to World War II times when, shortly thereafter, as a teenager, he got his start trucking via a little bit of a subterfuge on the part of his mother, as you’ll hear in the episode. (It included his first part-owned truck, the early-1950s White Western Star pictured in the thumbnail image for this episode.) As noted, Greff's story is excerpted from the first edition of what Corey Price hopes will eventually be a monthly podcast.
Along the way, as we run through Ken Greff’s early days trucking toward how he got from driving and owning rigs in Western Canada to sales in Middle Tennessee, we’ll hear more from Price, too, on his motivation for creating the podcast.
If you've got a tip on a veritable trucking legend you feel like Price ought to feature, he asks that you let him know via his email: cbprice@benlomand.net
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Oct 13, 2023
Speed limiter mandate: Safety, congestion concerns high among truckers opposed
Misplaced priorities, too, according to K&D Transport's Andrew Axelson in this edition of Overdrive Radio: "Instead of limiting the speed on trucks, they should really limit the speed on cars," he said. That where he contends most of the outlandish speed issues on American highways today sits.
This round of viewpoints on the FMCSA's move toward a speed limiter device mandate for in-use trucks follows September news picked up via the Department of Transportation’s regulatory calendar update that month that seemed to suggest FMCSA had settled on a 68-mph speed setting for its planned proposal of a mandate. When he got that news, Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills was immediately reminded of the time in 2012 when the federal agency appeared to be proposing to adopt fairly stringent sleep apnea screening restrictions as official regulatory guidance, only to almost immediately retract that, citing a “clerical error” after the restrictions were published in the Federal Register for comment: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14877502/sleep-apnea-reg-recommendations-comments-closed
Among other things, those apnea-screening restrictions would have required any trucker with a body-mass-index measure of just 35 to undergo apnea testing as a condition of getting a medical card. The notion that this could be bona fide guidance set off shockwaves around trucking. Congress soon after forbade the agency to change official sleep apnea guidance or regulation through any process other than formal rulemaking.
When it comes to a speed-limiter mandate today, somewhat similar dynamics are play. As with changes to the sleep apnea approach back then, it’s clear FMCSA wants to move on a mandate for speed-limiter use, yet what speed setting is to be adopted remains the big question.
FMCSA quickly retracted the language suggesting the 68 mph setting reported, among other details, from the DOT regs calendar: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15635000/68-mph-dot-report-sheds-light-fmcsas-speed-limiter-intent
But also as with the apnea “leak” in 2012, the shockwaves have continued to ripple out.
In this podcast, we drop into the scene around the Mayberry Truck Show in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, at the end of last month just after the latest speed-limiter news emerged. Overdrive video editor Lawson Rudisill found that the 68-mph news traveled fast, and gathered a bevy of views from owner-operators and other truckers in attendance at the truck show.
Dive in here for a round of views from six owners and operators.
More from Rudisill's video work at the Mayberry Truck Show:
**Benefit truck convoy: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/video/15635690/watch-the-rigs-roll-through-at-mayberry-truck-show
**Full show walkthrough: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/video/15635538/a-long-walk-through-the-2023-mayberry-truck-show
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Oct 6, 2023
Super-sweet spot hauling chocolate for Roger and Rita Wilson's two-truck operation
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, the clarion voices of the spectacular pair of owner-operators behind Chicago-area-based, two-truck Rita’s Absolute Trucking. That’d be Roger and Rita Wilson, who made a match with marriage in 1998 after separate histories trucking, Rita toting butter up and down the Eastern seaboard, Roger with an OTR history that stretches back to hauling swinging meat in 1970 his first time out over-the-road.
Through the 1980s, he worked with a friend in LTL consolidation out of the Chicago area, growing to 50 trucks there before venturing out on his own with five. Then Rita brought two of her own to the operation, becoming Rita's Absolute early this century and growing to 15 units. They’ve had big ups and downs managing fleets both, but after a slow period of downsizing over more than decade are now settled squarely into a super-sweet niche moving reefer trailers full of finished chocolate mostly between Chicago and Pennsylvania, for a single customer.
The pair were our Truckers of the Month for September, and regular Overdrive readers may recall their story recently published at OverdriveOnline.com: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15635072/lifes-a-lot-easier-ownerops-find-sweet-spot-with-two-trucks
In that story, we heard from a Ryder System rep directly about the Wilsons’ work with their warehousing customer in Blommer Chocolate Company, who've been the Wilson's customer for two decades now. Ryder had nothing but praise for Rita’s Absolute Trucking, for sure. Yet after the story published, we also heard back finally from a rep from Blommer. Janie Moore called Rita and Roger Wilson’s Absolute Trucking the “Absolute best. If I could have more carriers like them it would be a joy!”
Moore has worked with the pair for eight years, she said, and they’ve “helped simplify managing" and now totally dominate "the Illinois to Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania to Illinois lanes. Locally,” too, Rita has been a godsend, she added. “There were times we had more loads to move than they could manage legally in a day. Rita would go out of her way and rent a trailer for preloading purposes. This was not a Blommer request, but instead a decision she made to assist. And for that we are forever grateful.”
In eight years, Moore said, “I can count on one hand the times where they were late or delayed. While we know things happen beyond the carrier’s control, they have been more than proactive and giving us advance notification on mishaps, transportation delays, breakdowns, and etc.”
A worthy pair to honor, no doubt. And, clearly, they’ve found a sweet spot hauling chocolate.
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Sep 29, 2023
Has your trucking income taken a beating this down cycle? You're not alone
Owner-operator business services firm ATBS' midyear owner-operator update session September 19 revealed a few different ways the average ATBS client might make up the income loss we’ve seen over the last year and a half -- on average, it’s been an almost 10% decline.
In real terms, though, as ATBS VP Mike Hosted notes at the top of this edition, a 1% increase in fuel mileage would get all of that back for the average owner-operator. In short, there are tangible things that can be done to combat what's been tough times of late, particularly in the spot markets for freight.
For this edition, know that there’s also a Youtube version that is airing the same day that includes Mike Hosted’s presentation in full, if you want to follow along with all his slides presenting market and operating analysis data: https://youtu.be/toHRRbwi1Pc
Podcast listeners can download the slides, too. Follow along via the link you'll find here: http://overdriveonline.com/15634919
The audio comes from ATBS’ annual midyear temperature taking of the trucking market for owner-operators, offering a variety of insights. Things have changed mightily since this time a year ago. Rates are down big-time in the spot market, a little less so but also down in the contract market. That’s come with some positives. With declining demand, used-truck prices are way down, too, and parts and other maintenance difficulties, though not entirely resolved, seem to be getting better.
Hosted here runs through a bevy of the data for a market update, but also dives into real numbers averaged among clients who are independents with authority and/or small fleet operators and leased flatbed, reefer and dry van owners, to present bellwether industry averages against which to benchmark your own business performance.
A couple things definitely have not changed for the better since last year. Fuel’s recent moves have taken it back to the highest of highs, ever more reason to focus on fuel mileage improvement. And in addition to the long rates tumble, there’s another market-impacting element that’s decidedly worse coming out of the freight highs of the post-COVID period -- the cost of borrowing.
Yet there are a variety of indicators that have the folks at ATBS, Hosted included, feeling like we’ve hit the bottom of this market – quite some time ago, in fact. And though we’re probably going to stay here a while when it comes to rates, for owners who can weather the storm, the bottom line could look considerably better this time next year.
Owners looking for additional business-planning and other management tips, among a myriad of other topics, can find more in the Overdrive/ATBS-coproduced "Partners in Business" manual for new and established owner-operators, a comprehensive guide to running a small trucking business: http://overdriveonline.com/pib
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Sep 22, 2023
Meet Tommy Marshall: Lead hauler with ESPN College Gameday tour team truckers
Also in the podcast: Matt Cole live from the Guilty by Association Truck Show in Joplin Missouri in the area around 4 State Trucks there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/article/15634903/guilty-by-association-truck-show-starts-strong-in-joplin
Cole reports from Day 1 at GBATS -- How many owner-operators were at the show? What’s the mood in what’s certainly been a challenging year for so many small-business truckers? Cole spoke as owner-operators were getting parked up at 4 State Trucks and the surrounding area in Joplin, Missouri, for a bit of an update on how things were looking on-site at one of the absolutely biggest gatherings of the trucking community the nation over.
Cole also directed traffic with Game Creek Video entertainment-biz hauler Tommy Marshall out along University Avenue at the Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. Marshall is lead driver every fall for a crew of seven rigs and operators that make up quite a unique trucking niche. If you’ve been to OverdriveOnline.com this past week you’ll likely know that Marshall is the lead man for the mobile-television production of ESPN’s College Gameday broadcast, which airs every Saturday throughout the Fall ahead of the day’s football games, live from a different university site each week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15634571/a-unique-beast-behind-the-scenes-on-mobile-tv-production-trucking
Drop into some of Cole’s detailed reporting around the operation, with Marshall in the production studio truck for Game Creek Video and several operators from a few different companies dedicated to the production. That includes West River Light and Sound, and longtime trucker Gerry Glass. It’s Glass’s initial contact that led to the opportunity Cole got to spend with Tommy Marshall and the rest of the crew in Tuscaloosa two weeks back. Glass got in touch with Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills on Labor Day Monday, as the crew was prepping to head to Tuscaloosa to stage on the campus for Alabama v. Texas.
Would we be interested in seeing what they do firsthand? Gerry Glass asked. Overdrive is headquartered in Tuscaloosa, of course, but Dills live in Nashville, Tennessee. However; Cole was the perfect man for the job, a U. of A. Crimson Tide fan, no less.
He was on-hand for their initial unloading two days later, on Wednesday, and parts of the set-up the following days, too, with Tommy Marshall as a guide. Marshall and crew do a great deal more than just drive in such a production, of course -- in fact, driving might be the least time-consuming part of the whole affair, depending on whatever university location Gameday chooses week to week.
Cole ultimately delivered with a detailed look at the mobile-TV trucking niche. Find that and other reports from a wide array of freight niche operations via our occasional Niche Hauls series, collected via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4378936
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Sep 15, 2023
Grabbing history's reins with 1978 W900A on '96 Dodge chassis, '46 Brockway, more: Adam Johnson
K&D Transport third-generation owner/manager Adam Johnson in this Overdrive Radio edition narrates the beginnings of his grandfather’s time trucking with a 1946 Brockway he purchased without the seats to save a little on the price. – It was a different time, and Johnson’s grandfather was back from World War II, where he was a POW for 18 months, Johnson said, a story he told in part attendant to our recent profile of K&D Transport recognition their semi-finalist status in Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship this year: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15544771/kd-transport-owner-in-the-groove-with-thirdgen-flatbed-fleet
In the podcast, we pick up around the edges of the parts of Adam Johnson and the K&D Transport fleet’s story that we didn’t much cover in that business feature. The 14-truck fleet has quite a story, particularly with regard to recent-history moves that have cemented its current mix of flatbed freight. Yet there’s more to Johnson par…
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Sep 9, 2023
Beating the odds, from Chicago construction dump to OTR: Trucker of the Month Steve Massat
Owner-operator Steven Massat is today headquartered in Addison, Illinois, and leased to nearby small fleet T Max Transportation with quite a special truck. Regular Overdrive readers may well have seen his story at OverdriveOnline.com a couple weeks back now: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15546000/ownerop-overcomes-physical-challenge-for-successful-career
There, owner-operator Massat was named August Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running for Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year award: http://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year
We’ve been counting down the months this year with profiles of and podcasts with each of the individual monthly semi-finalist owners -- or teams of owners, as it were. In this week's edition, Massat describes the teamwork he and his wife make of the business -- she handles much of the back office work while he runs the roads and, on the weekend, utilizes a purpose-built shop to maintain the late 1980s-built B-model…
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Sep 1, 2023
Inside an explosion of cyber crime in brokered-freight networks, with DAT's Jeff Hopper
For this edition of Overdrive Radio, DAT Freight and Analytics' Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Hopper, who’s been with the company now for decades, notes the undeniable spike in double brokering, in identity theft and hop-in, hop-out "take the money and run" and other schemes that has led to a doubling of staff in DAT’s compliance department as well as a host of other in-process security enhancements there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15542218/dat-steps-up-fight-against-freight-fraud-but-is-it-enough
DAT's not alone, of course -- competitors at Truckstop.com have been doing similar things when it comes ID’ing the various types of “bad behavior” and working with the good guys out there to put a stop to it where possible, in no small part thanks to the efforts of a myriad of small business truckers to raise the temperature around the issue of double brokering and other fraud: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15541639/the-third-parties-follow…
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Aug 25, 2023
After Yellow ceased operations, trucker Chris Dowdy's picking up the pieces
Chris Dowdy counts he and his wife, Paula, and their family among the lucky ones. The subject of this edition of Overdrive Radio is one ripped right from the last month or so of a myriad headlines -- the bankruptcy and ceasing operations of Yellow, The LTL giant finally shut after being propped up by an astounding amount of loaned money straight from the U.S. taxpayer in recent years. That followed the business generally struggling financially for many more.
The largely union workforce there was a home for many, many people, though, and that included Dowdy for a substantial part of the last decade or so. If his name sounds familiar, longtime Overdrive readers among you may well recall his time driving for Wooten Transports with a home base in Memphis, when he spearheaded an initiative he called Truckers for Hope years ago: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14885626/new-truckers-for-hope-initiative-to-benefit-st-jude
Through the philanthropic effort, Dowdy staged visi…
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Aug 18, 2023
The best of the best from trucker-songwriter Tony Justice: The story behind 'Greatest Shifts'
Trucker-songwriter leading light Tony Justice's new "Greatest Shifts" record features six new tracks, five originals plus a fantastic rendition of Jerry Reed's classic "Eastbound and Down," and 14 previously released highlights from four records -- "Apple Pie Moonshine," "Brothers of the Highway," "Stars Stripes and White Lines," and "18 Gears to Life." Those records comprise a decades' worth of music from Justice, excluding unfortunately his first trucking-themed record, "On the Road," for reasons he explains in this Overdrive Radio edition. Herein, Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills' recent conversation with Justice about the new material on the album and the background behind the production is interspersed with plenty opportunity to hear some of the new music.
("On the Road" you can hear via this link: https://open.spotify.com/album/5gsluBHAVUqMjotVyxbvli?si=VJklYb17TVWsm9KFMnjt-A )
Among previously released material is a "dance remix" of Justice's “Last of the Cowboys” tune, fir…
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Aug 11, 2023
Introducing Freight Fest, host-to-host with Truck N' Hustle podcast's Rahmel Wattley
Today we’re peeking through a window onto a conference in its second year and coming up down in Houston, building on a thus-far-four-year journey of one New Jersey-based Rahmel Wattley, host of the 2019-founded Truck N' Hustle podcast.
That's right, for this edition of Overdrive Radio, it’s host-to-host, as it were. Truck N’ Hustle, well-known among entrepreneurs of a variety of stripes all around trucking and transportation, pitches to owner-operators and small fleets in a variety of trucking niches, among other transport pros. Freight Fest, then, is Wattley and company’s conference upcoming next month in Houston, building on the success of his podcast in bringing together disparate communities around the business.
Among presenters there are anyone from reps at freight-factoring company OTR Capital, a sponsor of the event, and voices many of you will be familiar with from Overdrive Radio, too, like Innovative Logistics Group founder Adam Wingfield, whose tale of his start tr…
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Aug 4, 2023
Making car-haul look easy with owner-op Crystal Rives: 'Couldn't imagine doing anything else'
She does just about all of it, Crystal Rives, when it comes to the maintenance of her one-truck Texas-intrastate car-haul business. She's put a big emphasis on solid partnerships through the years, whether with a trusted engine/major mechnical shop or a growing stable of customers. That's particularly so since she went out on her own with authority to haul cars in 2016. The move followed almost a decade and a half hauling cars for other companies, work in the Texas oilfield, end dump, side dump, pneumatic and liquid-bulk tank.
This Overdrive Radio tour through Rives’ business and history in trucking is part of our monthly series of podcasts and feature profiles of contenders for the 2023 Trucker of the Year award: http://overdrieonline.com/trucker-of-the-year
Rives is our July Trucker of the Month, in part recognized for a can-do approach to the work, a real do-it-yourself spirit in trucking and in life. She’s out of Cleburne Texas, south of Fort Worth, where she’s built a stea…
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Jul 28, 2023
Lightning round: Owner-operators' worst roads in America, take two
We ask again: What's the worst stretch of road on your routes? Let's keep a spotlight on where state DOTs should put all those tax dollars -- dial 615-852-8530 to weigh in.
Here,something of a lightning round of owner-operator responses to our prior call, put out attendant to the podcast several weeks back about the terrible toll I-40 in Arizona is taking from owner-ops' pocketbooks in repairs. Rougher than a corncob? You bet: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15540092/arizona-i40-rougher-than-a-corncob-you-bet
Several viewpoints here from listeners who dialed into our podcast message line with their recommendations for places in the U.S. that especially need work, from more worst-roads "accolades" for I-40 to sections of I-10, I-20, I-74, U.S. 491 and others.
As noted in the podcast, some detail on one of those stretches with a big project ongoing in Ohio: https://www.transportation.ohio.gov/projects/projects/104668
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Jul 21, 2023
Owner-operator Kate Whiting's journey to trucking by way of 1973 W900A custom resto
Today on the podcast, the captivating story of a truck -- and its owner-operator, Kate Whiting of Wisconsin. The rig, a 1973 Kenworth W900A, turned a half-century old this year of the Kenworth company's centennial. Whiting piloted the rig, "Cherry Pie," in the 100th-anniversary parade in Chillicothe, Ohio, back in June: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/article/15541257/kenworth-celebrates-100th-anniversary-with-kenworth-truck-parade
That's not its only recent accolade, following the truck's first bit of national notoriety around the time of the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville last year. Overdrive's video from that show of the Cherry Pie 1973 Kenworth W900A has since been viewed tens of thousands of times: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/video/15291440/owneroperator-kate-whitings-1973-kenworth-w900a
And with more show participation since the debut of Whiting and her team's immaculate custom-restoration, the accolades have just continued to pile up and pi…
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Jul 10, 2023
FMCSA offering 'kinder, gentler' approach to safety scoring? Not if automated inspections go live
In today’s early special edition of Overdrive Radio for podcast subscribers, another installment in the Trucking’s State of Surveillance multipart series: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541635
If you missed Long Haul Paul Marhoefer’s talk with Karen Levy in the previous edition of the podcast, track back to it -- it dropped Friday, July 7, to the Overdrive Radio feed. Levy’s "Data Driven" book, about how the ELD mandate changed the face of trucking in so many ways (magnified longstanding issues in others), really sets the stage for this talk with attorney Hank Seaton: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541633
The final piece of the State of Surveillance special reports, too, is particularly germane. It's the story about the rather slow, though quickening, moves toward automation of roadside inspections: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541828
This long talk with Nashville-headquartered transportation attorney Seaton connects some dots in his thinking about the roadside a…
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Jul 7, 2023
Regulators 'miss the boat' on trucking and the ELD mandate, rise of 'new workplace surveillance'
For this Overdrive Radio edition, a bit of a special preview of a special report dropping this coming Monday, July 10. It’s called “Trucking’s State of Surveillance” and follows Overdrive’s surveying of our owner-operator, small fleet and company driver readers about remote monitoring- and/or tracking-capable technologies used in the business. We asked readers assess the techs they use -- from smartphones and ELDs to truck and trailer telematics and various permutations of monitoring video cameras -- and rate what’s being given up in costs and/or being gained in benefits.
Reporting around those results yielded plenty in the way of how working owner-ops and other truckers view how techs are changing the trucking business and culture, as monitoring goes well beyond just fleets today and sits squarely in other business-to-business relationships with brokers and others.
But all of that reporting also followed attorney and academic Karen Levy’s book "Data Driven: Truckers,…
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Jun 30, 2023
Writing the book on trucking as an independent: June Trucker of the Month Debbie Desiderato
This week on Overdrive Radio, we reintroduce June’s Trucker of the Month, Debbie Desiderato, in conversation with our own Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole. Cole’s story about Desiderato’s long trucking career is live as of earlier this week at the website: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15541324/independent-debbie-desideratos-keys-to-trucking-success
Today, we’ll hear parts of that in Desiderato’s own words. She’s built considerable value with the do-it-yourself approach to business throughout her well more than two decades as an independent owner-operator. If Debbie’s name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s been here on the podcast before – likewise in our coproduction with PRX’s Radiotopia network of the Over the Road series, which originally aired in 2020: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4405867
Active with the Make a Wish foundation’s Mother’s Day convoy events, the Real Women in Trucking advocacy group and other organiz…
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Jun 23, 2023
Trucking owner-operators call out the worst road in America
Asked by Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole for the stretch of road they felt could be described as the absolute worst in the nation, all but one owner-operator at Shell Rotella's SuperRigs show two weeks back in Wyoming didn’t flinch in singling out I-40 in Arizona. Others are calling it the absolute worst they’ve ever seen.
Danville, Virginia-based owner-operator Joey Slaughter, who runs the route routinely on cross-country step deck hauls, was the man who brought this subject to our attention this Spring. Clearly, it’s not hard to find similar viewpoint on the stretch between Kingman and Flagstaff. The road’s condition has translated to hard dollars and lost time with equipment repairs.
Slaughter's hopeful for movement on new pavement soon, but questions why the road was allowed to get so bad in the first place. Rough nature of the freeze-thaw cycles this past winter has something to do with, but that can’t be all, he feels.
Other owners you'll hear in this edition:
Cody D…
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Jun 16, 2023
Work-life balance as an owner-operator, small fleet owner: You have to build it
With this Overdrive Radio edition for June 16, 2023, points of view on the absolute necessity of respecting the needs for work-life balance for your personal sanity, and for the success of your business. That balance can be particularly elusive for independent owner-operators, as Silver Creek Transportation owner Jason Cowan well knows -- he spent much of his early career in those shoes with just a single truck himself, and in some ways balance might elude those of you who fit that bill more than anyone in trucking.
In this edition, we’ll walk through a variety of strategies to achieve it, with a goal of healthy success. The podcast features the bulk of a late-May-held webcast presentation and discussion Overdrive hosted with Cowan, our big 2021 Small Fleet Champ winner, and Adam Wingfield, who’s head of the Innovative Logistics Group consultancy, also a past independent owner-operator himself: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15448347/worklife-balance-as-an-ownero…
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Jun 9, 2023
Trucking with authority, take 2: Trucker of the Month Matthew Karr reboots after banner year leased
'Strike when the market's cold' -- it might be a maxim for the outlook on small business for Overdrive May Trucker of the Month Matthew Karr, coming off an excellent profit year hauling fuel leased to Quality Transportation out of Halltown, Missouri: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15448529/owneroperator-matthew-karrs-fuel-hauling-hustle-pays-off
Now's the ideal time, as he details in this podcast, to go back out on his own to do things entirely his way, keeping a past small-fleet failure high in his mind. During the height of the COVID market when Karr sold most of his small fleet equipment at a premium and went back to leasing, a friend was "wanting to buy a truck" and get in on the spot freight boom, "when the market was stupid," Karr said -- stupid high, that is, for equipment.
"Luckily, he listened to me" and didn't do it. "I said, 'Robert, I've been through these ups and downs and swings for 25 years. ... If you want to buy a truck and you want to ge…
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Jun 2, 2023
Another reason to fight traffic tickets: Convictions can now impact independents' safety ratings
This edition of Overdrive Radio touches on a area of long-well-founded concern for owner-operators. That’s the importance of, when possible, fighting the stains on the motor vehicle record that can come in the form of tickets for moving violations of all types. Pay the fine, and it’s like pleading guilty and doing the proverbial time. A "conviction” will be paid for in a myriad ways beyond just the cash fine: higher insurance rates, marks on your company’s CSA SMS profile and its scoring, possible audit hassles given more violations on the record mean greater likelihood of prioritization by federal or state investigators for an audit.
Yet there's another, relatively new way anyone with motor carrier authority could pay, too –- Jeff Davis, longtime Fleet Safety Services compliance consultant, who supports mostly small carriers in the event of an audit, outlines it here.
Last year, FMCSA modified its safety rating methodology, Davis said. For the first time auditors will be a…
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May 26, 2023
Owner-operator evolution: 'Partners in Business' on Red Eye Radio's 'Extra Mile'
'Owner-op business, start to finish' -- it could be the motto to describe Overdrive's annual coproduction with business services firm ATBS of the Partners in Business manual: http://overdriveonline.com/pib
And it was the broader topic of this talk with the great Red Eye Radio host Eric Harley at the Mid-America Trucking Show, on the occasion of the 2023 PIB book's release, now available for download via the previous link. The talk includes Overdrive Editor Todd Dills and longtime contributor and owner-operator coach Gary Buchs, along with PIB collaborator Mike Hosted from ATBS. It originally aired in its full form as part of the Red Eye Radio “Extra Mile” podcast extra series, available via https://www.redeyeradioshow.com/the-extra-mile-podcast/
Overdrive’s also released a series of short video excerpts of the talk via the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc1lg9rs1dUBRbJKjvc7UUcJRRd4iI2v3
It’s a wide-ranging talk focused on vital aspects of owner-opera…
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May 19, 2023
A wrap on Roadcheck with the 'Mustang' | Introducing Mother Truck Yoga proprietor Hope Zvara
Truck show platform personalities come and go, but Hope Zvara's mission to improve truckers' quality of life with a program that leans on small, incremental changes in their daily routines continues to gain traction. Founder and CEO of Mother Trucker Yoga, Zvara's the author of "Trucking Yoga: Simple Fitness for fhe Long Haul," a book in which Zvara gives us an unvarnished account of how her own struggles with addiction and depression drove a personal need to get healthy.
"I've struggled with depression and anxiety on catastrophic levels," she said. "Yoga, and movement, saved my life."
Included in the book, too, is a regimen of down to earth, practical yoga exercises adapted to the ergonomics of a semi-tractor. At the Mid-America Trucking Show, as you can see in the thumbnail image for today's edition of Overdrive Radio above, she led our own Long Haul Paul through a few of them. And in Paul and Zvara's talk here, she offers answers to these questions relative to notions of a mental-…
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May 12, 2023
Double brokering a 'cancer' requiring whole-of-trucking battle plan | New Pete 589: Go inside
This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast, a bit of a double feature. We'll hear from General Transportation and ART Trucking's Jason Decker. Regular Overdrive readers will recall reporting on some of Decker’s talk at the Mid-America Trucking Show back in March that was something of a rallying cry for a “whole of trucking” battle approach to the fight against double brokering, leaching money from the freight markets through fraud as it is:
Rates are bad enough already, it’s sure, as Decker emphasized.
Fraudulent actors insert themselves into a freight transaction, disappear with a fuel advance or the entire load’s payment. If the trucker’s paid at all, then, it’s a double payment on the part of whoever was the original broker and/or shipper on the load. That's but one double-brokering scenario. Perhaps worse than that, in Decker’s and I know many owner-operators’ views, legit brokers who knowingly "give the load to another brokerage," Decker said. "They are double-di…
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May 5, 2023
Frugality only goes so far after getting used to $4/mile freight, but Jay Hosty's staying choosy
A natural inclination for frugality is a winning quality for most anybody in the world today, and no doubt for an owner-operator. That's one of the central qualities Jay Hosty, our Trucker of the Month for April, put dead center of his now 41-year-long history of success as an owner-operator in trucking. As Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole wrote in our profile of owner-operator Hosty last week, he got his start in trucking as an owner pulling containers around New Orleans, Louisiana, at the young age of 19 in 1981: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15383689/frugality-focus-on-costs-pays-off-for-owneroperator-jay-hosty
Frugality's certainly served him well during the last year and a half’s rising costs, yet it only goes so far after a couple of years' worth of getting used to $4/mile freight. The squeeze is on, coming from both sides of the profit equation.
"it's hard to come back to the reality of $2/mile freight," Hosty said, and thus far in 2023 he's a bi…
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Apr 28, 2023
New app for broker-lookup/review, navigation, IFTA and other accounting -- designed by an owner-op
This Overdrive Radio podcast edition drops into our talk with Charlotte, N.C.-based owner-operator Deron Salmon about his brand-new Truck Networking application for iPhone and Android devices -- Truck’N for short. It's available now for a 14-day free trial with monthly subscription thereafter.
Iphone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truck-networking/id1606433569
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.semnexus.apps.truckn.truckn
The app’s origin story stems from a void Salmon felt like he saw in broker-lookup and review tools for owner-operators. There are some out there, for sure -- the big load boards are principal there -- yet Salmon wanted to take the concept further to allow for quicker, more inclusive ways to rate and review experiences. His thoughts on the matter stemmed from a brokered run some years ago with an appointment time that, nonetheless, had him facing the prospect of waiting quite literally all day for the pickup.
The broker offered nothing in…
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Apr 21, 2023
Paths to 10-plus mpg in a Class 8 diesel tractor with aero, downspeeding, more
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, drop in with three operators for a panel discussion held at the Mid-America Trucking Show last month. The discussion was aimed at showing all the ways these three have done what once might have been unthinkable -- get to, and pass, the 10-miles-per-gallon mark in a Class 8 tractor-trailer hauling freight.
They included a man longtime Overdrive readers will well be familiar with -- 2007 Overdrive Trucker of the Year Henry Albert, running independent and as a longtime participant in Freightliner’s Run Smart program real-world-testing new truck and diesel technologies built toward boosting efficiencies. Albert was joined by owner-operator Joel Morrow and driver Clark Reed, the latter also part of the longtime Freightliner initiative. The trio fielded questions from Mike Roeth, a leader with the North American Council for Freight Efficiency: http://nacfe.org
(As Roeth notes in the podcast, Albert, Morrow and Reed were all part of NACFE's…
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Apr 14, 2023
Making it work, and then some: Illinois-headquartered food-grade tank haulers Pulli Express
Happy Friday before Tax Day! Got those filings done?
One suspects the answer is yes for our guests on today's edition of Overdrive Radio, Tim Pulli and his wife, Shelley Puzek-Pulli, our March Truckers of the Month: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15380625/path-to-profits-through-continual-adjustment-pulli-express
The Chicago-area-headquartered owner-operators today run two trucks of their own and with another owner-operator leased on. They’re in the competition for Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year award, and as a husband-wife team of a business, it’s close collaboration in their drive to success that sets them apart. Though since their marriage in 2005, it hasn’t always been that way, exactly.
Shelley herself wasn’t so involved in the business before Tim flipped the switch to get his authority around 2012 and the pair, together, moved toward a contract with the Sweetener Supply liquid-sugar manufacturer in their area, a contract that more tha…
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Apr 12, 2023
‘The extra load' to boost profitability in tough times -- Overdrive's Partners in Business at MATS
If you haven’t checked in at OverdriveOnline.com lately, get over to the Partners in Business section for our newly-updated, 2023 edition of the owner-operator business guide of the same name: http://overdriveonline.com/pib
Weighing in at a grand total of 140 and more pages this year, the Partners in Business manual covers owner-operator business from start to finish, all the way from the basics of business planning before start-up to going independent, growing a small fleet and prepping adequately for a comfortable retirement.
New this year:
**A brief primer on avoiding -- and combating -- the huge rise in double-brokering of the past few years
**Further resources on saving taxes and gaining business management dividends via the S Corp tax filing structure for LLCs.
**Updates on lending markets given the rise in borrowing costs for new and used equipment purchases of the last year
**New strategies for how to approach fuel surcharges as an independent, and maximize efficiency whate…
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Apr 7, 2023
'The spot market is not for you': On building steady trucking business with authority
The freight spot markets are undeniably tough right now, that's sure, with rates continuing their slide for vans and reefers nationally in the last week, and profitability strained for all manner of independent owner-operators and small carriers with authority. Yet Adam Wingfield, whose talk early on the last day of the Mid-America Trucking Show Saturday, April 1, makes up the bulk of today's Overdrive Radio edition, wanted to make clear to all the owners in the audience a central message:
"You're going to be OK," Wingfield said early in his "Weathering the storm" talk.
OK, that is, if you do the work to solidify your relationships with the brokers, shippers and others who take care of you as you take care of them. If you truly own your backyard, so to speak, and take the time to connect with freight customers in your area. You'll be OK if you predict maintenance needs with well-timed interval tracking and stay compliant to enhance competitiveness in negotiations -- the difference be…
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Mar 31, 2023
Fit or Unfit? FMCSA keying in on problems with 'Conditional' safety rating limbo
With an FMCSA regulatory update session just concluded at MATS, one thing that stood out was that the agency didn't mention a plan to advance a rulemaking around its safety rating system for motor carriers. FMCSA Associate Administrator Larry Minor, however, speaking to the specialized carriers' Specialized Transportation Symposium just a month ago, revealed potential to begin a rulemaking process to possibly change the system as early as this year.
Should the three-tiered Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and Conditional rating system remain? Minor asked SCRA attendees, characterizing the fundamental early question any move toward a change would ask. Or: Should a two-tiered, "Fit or Unfit" system be adopted?
That’s what some small fleets and associated advocates have been calling for for years, as so very many have sat in that Conditional limbo -- some even for decades -- after an adverse review, despite efforts to improve. It's only gotten increasingly difficult to then get FMCSA out…
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Mar 24, 2023
Tales from a trainer's truck: Good, bad, ugly with reefer operator Bill Douglas
With truck-show season fast upon us, Long Haul Paul Marhoefer takes the mic for this week's Overdrive Radio edition as the Mid America Trucking show's set to commence on Thursday, March 30th.
There will be the pageantry and the pomp, the polish and the shine. Influencers, thought leaders, and micro-celebrities. (Oh my!)
But you know what Marhoefer looks forward to the most? It's the war stories. It's the accounts you hear while you're waiting on a table to open up at a steakhouse, or maybe while tipping back a cool beverage or two. It's the unguarded things people tell you about their lives and work when they've had a few days to step away and decompress.
This episode features one such conversation. Owner-operator Bill Douglas is an old truck show friend. Marhoefer met him at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas back around 2016. Back then, Bill was just thinking about becoming a trucker. These days, he's a six-year veteran of the super slab, hauling with a mission, too, to…
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Mar 17, 2023
One oversize hauler's mobile shower solution | Dispatch from I-80 Wyo.'s 'winter from hell'
Owner-operator Andy Freeman, headquartered in Richland Center, Wisconsin, hauls in a 2014 Freightliner 122SD pulling a much newer Trail King RGN mini-deck, outfitted for what are mostly oversize loads on the hook. Overdrive Radio caught up with Freeman in Orlando, Florida, on the site of the Specialized Carriers and Rigging Association’s annual Specialized Transportation Symposium.
Freeman, leased to Landstar now for many years and hauling most aviation-related freight -- “airport to airport,” as he puts it -- had his rig empty and set up in the conference hotel parking lot where Florida Highway Patrol inspectors demonstrated a walkaround Level 2 inspection of it for conference attendees.
The trailer was empty, that is, unless you looked a little more closely: About dead center lengthwise on the minideck was an itty-bitty chained-down toy loader. Turned out it wasn’t just Freeman's attempt at good humor for conference attendees -- and those inspectors -- but rather a long-use…
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Mar 10, 2023
Plan for success designed, executed for a long-term home: Truckers of the Month Ruth and Chris Smith
Owner-operator Chris Smith, one half of the team that is Dreamline Trucking, is today headquartered in Crossville, Tennessee. His trucking career follows a beginning far from U.S. shores across the pond in continental Europe, the Middle East and where his family's originally from, Britain. As regular readers will know, he and the other half of the Dreamline team -- Ruth, his wife and business partner -- were Overdrive’s Truckers of the Month for February. Follow this link if you missed Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole’s feature report about the business: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15307364/how-this-owneroperator-team-earned-success
After meeting and marrying during those early UK days, the Smiths’ Dreamline business is now anchored by their long relationship and team operation leased to Southern Pride Trucking, hauling jet engines and other aviation-related freight. They’ve got almost 10 years behind them as business owners, hauling today in a b…
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Mar 3, 2023
Hear AM/FM CB difference -- the story behind the FCC petition that launched dual-mode radios in U.S.
For this edition of the podcast, Mark Karnes tells the story of the petition that the Cobra company put to the Federal Communications Commission some years back to allow the use of FM rather than just standard AM in CB Radios. With the petition granted in 2021, Cobra is now out with AM/FM dual-mode versions of all of its most-commonly-used models.
Karnes, a vice president with Cedar Electronics, Cobra's parent company, notes the transition from AM-only radios to dual modes won't happen overnight, yet notes when more FM-capable radios are in play, owner-operators will find better voice clarity over the radio when used in FM mode on both ends.
Hear a measure of that improved clarity here, as Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills recorded transmissions between two dual-mode versions of Cobra's Mini 19 radio, while running the same route in one vehicle as the other vehicle remained stationary. But for slight adjustments to squelch on both units, each radio remained at standard out-of-the-box s…
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Feb 24, 2023
Running the lease roads to well sites with tank operator Edward Jackson of John McGee Trucking
Louisiana-born-and-raised longtime operator Edward Jackson has been running for Overdrive's 2022 Small Fleet Champ John McGee Trucking since the operation was but a project of owner-operator McGee and a just a couple other employed haulers. These days, McGee "has a whole lot more on his plate," Jackson told me, testament to the small fleet's strong growth to around 20 trucks the last several years. Jackson and I were bumping and jostling about in the cab of one of McGee's late-model Macks on our way down a narrow lease road to an oil/gas well site not far from the fleet's Simsboro headquarters, there in the northern part of the Pelican state.
What we were after? A load of John McGee Trucking's bread and butter, production water that comes up from the ground with oil and gas and separates into one of two tanks down in a bottom at the end of this road. The big tanks flanked an area just big enough to turn that rig around, quite muddy in ruts from the big trucks that visit the site regul…
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Feb 20, 2023
Bust up the stigma around mental health for a chance at a better trucking life
The last couple weeks have been a bit heavy for several of us here at Overdrive, since learning of the passing of an operator we knew who took his own life. It's a difficult subject to know how to approach, to communicate, and one Overdrive Extra contributor/longtime hauler Clifford Petersen notes still comes with a stigma attached to it that make it all the more difficult. Namely, and more broadly, we're talking about mental health, and just how to be an effective means of support for all with whom we come into contact.
On this special-edition Monday podcast -- apologies for all who were expecting our usual Friday drop -- dive in with Petersen to talk through his own journey to where he is today, with a mission to be a lifeline of support specifically to those who, like him, work over-the-road and struggle with anxiety, depression, in his case PTSD, and/or a myriad other issues. Petersen's trained in substance-abuse counseling and life coaching broadly, likewise a variety of psycholo…
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Feb 10, 2023
Owner-operator Kelvin Schmidt: 'You've got to be an accountant' to ensure long-term biz success
Owner-operator Kelvin Schmidt, Trucker of the Month for January in Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year program, didn't come to a formula for enduring success without a tour through the proverbial school of hard knocks, as it were. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, hear his own account of his start as a flatbed-pulling hotshotter in a one-ton dually, his stumbles through other trucks and growing "as bad as an accountant" focus on costs, revenue and profit per-trip to keep a guiding hand on the business.
"You've got to know what your costs are, and I do that for absolutely every trip I do," he said. "Every trip." Diligence in tracking costs enabled some of the big early shifts in his approach to equipment. After bad experiences with a variety of used trucks -- then with a newer yet no-less-problematic glider, he changed tack and began purchasing new, realizing full well the costs not just of repairs of accompanying downtime.
His end-of-year profit-and-loss statement for 2022 show…
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Feb 3, 2023
John McCormick's long road to steady dry-bulk freight, for the whole family
In this week's Overdrive Radio, drop back into more from host Todd Dills' November run with Oakley Trucking-leased owner-operator John McCormick out of Robards, Kentucky, near Henderson. Regular readers and listeners will recall the prior podcast, where we dug into McCormick's Pride & Polish-winning 2021 Kenworth, christened "Bandit" given its paint scheme’s resemblance to the Snowman’s rig in the 1970s classic movie Smokey & the Bandit.
There, we heard plenty about just how that rig got its name, McCormick’s approach to financing -- in this case direct through the finance arm of MHC Kenworth, the dealer group from which he bought the W900L late in 2020 -- and more. Today we pick up with more about the two rounds he makes daily, between Cresline Plastic Pipe in Henderson, where he unloads PVC powder picked down in Calvert City, Kentucky, from the manufacturer there.
Dills spoke with McCormick this morning and, after a few OTR runs farther afield over the holidays, when the plan…
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Jan 27, 2023
Diesel-electric innovation in a 1969 KW: Chace Barber on 'Voice of GO(r)D' podcast
We’ve got a bit of a special edition of Overdrive Radio for you this week. There’s a guest host of sorts, who’s going to walk us through a conversation with Chace Barber, cofounder of Edison Motors. If Barber's name sounds familiar, you may have read Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting of some of what Barber’s been doing with a diesel-electric concept that’s similar to the way locomotive work. The system features effectively an on-board diesel generator serving only to charge in this case a lithium ion battery powering an electric motor capable of monster loads of both horsepower and torque. In the case of Barber and company's prototype, that's all inside a beautiful and beautifully tough old 1969 Kenworth they call, simply, Old Blue.
Log hauler, writer, and podcaster Gord Magill recently drew out more of Chace Barber’s company’s origin story and plenty about just where his electric-drive trucks stand to be best applied in his Voice of GO(R)D podcast.
G…
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Jan 20, 2023
Keep Trucking with small fleet owner Mike Nelms, integrating biz-education goals into operations
With today's edition of Overdrive Radio we’re going to drop into conversation with a man who’s been making a name for himself around the Atlanta-area trucking community the last decade or so while building a small fleet -- Mike Nelms, owner of Keep Trucking Transportation. The 20-or-so-truck fleet pulls reefers and dry vans with a mix of brokered and direct business, made up mostly of owners leased on, including many owner-operators. Mike Nelms has just a few trucks of his own.
Nelms has brought instincts for raising up those around him with an interest in the trucking business, incorporating distinctly educational efforts directly into operations. All employed there approach relationships with contracted owners with an educational mission in mind, hoping to set up all owners for future success as they remain leased on or, eventually, go out on their own with authority.
And last year Nelms debuted a first-time event in Atlanta to connect owner-operators and others with newer truc…
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Jan 13, 2023
Battery-electric's trucking reality -- parking shortage will 'look a whole lot worse'
In a previous edition of Overdrive Radio, News Editor Matt Cole dug into the American Transportation Research Institute's close look at the life-cycle emissions associated with the production and operation of diesel, battery-electric and hydrogen-powered trucks. As noted in the very title of that past episode, the research in some ways cut through the politics and PR that surrounds electric-vehicle technology, showing such vehicles would be no true "zero emissions" panacea when production-associated demands are considered, particularly for battery-electric trucks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15292003/how-politics-and-pr-cloud-zero-emissions-trucks-reality
In today's edition, Cole talks with Jeff Short, ATRI VP, about follow-up research that poses something of a counterfactual on the way toward throwing more cold-hard reality on top of the politics and PR around vehicle electrification. If the entirety of the U.S. vehicle fleet, from owner-operators' heavy t…
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Jan 6, 2023
Re-air: Get ready for the downturn, it's right around the corner
This time a year ago, well before the extent of the coming year's cost-inflationary pressures were fully known, owner-operators delivered mixed signals for the coming year of 2022, though 65% predicted income to be better or about the same as prior year 2021. This year, the script has most certainly flipped on the 2023 outlook, with 61% looking out and seeing worse or level conditions to come.
Among commenters reflecting the near-majority fearing worse conditions ahead was one who, though fuel prices have moderated a bit in the last month or so, expected more hikes in the future: "With no end in sight on fuel prices going up, taking away from the bottom line, then '23 is definitely going to be worse than '22."
Today on Overdrive Radio, we're re-airing a September talk with Glen and Karla Horack, Glen named Owner-Operator of the Year in March of 2022. Horack's diligent approach to reserve-account savings is instructive for anybody looking to hedge against the chance of a big downturn.…
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Dec 30, 2022
Survive a heart attack, fight freight fraud, button up the business: 2022 on Overdrive Radio
Another day, another year nearly in the books -- here's our annual Overdrive Radio year-in-review. Thanks for hanging in with us through yet another big year for trucking as an owner-operator, one with absolutely huge challenges, for sure. We’ll hear about a lot of them again today. But hopefully, by the end, there’s something that sparks a new idea, or urges you on to completion of an old goal with new rigor, with new vigor.
2022 was a big one for Overdrive Radio, too -- thanks to longtime contributor and trucker-songwriter Long Haul Paul Marhoefer and the pros at Muscle Shoals Music Marketing we got an updated theme in Marhoefer's "Legend of the Snakeman," for one, an ode to the legendary guitarist who featured on Marhoefer's cut of the track, Travis "The Snakeman" Wammack.
The podcast also got the nod for Best Podcast from the business journalism folks behind the Jesse H. Neal Awards early in the year: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15291438/fmcsa-updating…
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Dec 23, 2022
Owner-op Steven Meyer's vets-tribute FLD and Kentucky trailer, delivering Wreaths Across America
And so much more, no doubt. Here’s a big Merry Christmas to everybody to start off this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. We drop in on quite an experience Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie had just a little more than a week ago at the Danbury, Connecticut, stop on the Wreaths Across America convoy tour from Maine down to Arlington National Cemetery for the big central wreath-laying event. It's but one among thousands around the country at veterans’ cemeteries designed to pay respect to those who’ve served the nation.
Lockie there met Hampton Roads Moving and Storage owner-operator Steven Meyer and his 1998 Freightliner FLD, pulling a custom wrapped Kentucky trailer of his own design and dedicated to honoring distinct individuals. Together, through Meyer's narration their histories chart a story of achievement, of sacrifice, and ultimately of elemental things about human nature. For both men in the moment, the story delivers a measure of hope for the future o…
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Dec 16, 2022
Semi Sam delivers: Three new children's books shed light on trucking for young minds
When 11 years ago Overdrive first talked with Jared Flinn, operating partner of the BulkLoads.com load board specializing in bulk freight, that business was at the two-guys-in-basement stage, following Flinn’s work trucking himself a little, then managing logistics for a big commodities outfit. He comes to the BulkLoads.com project with a passion to serve small fleets and owner-operators, the 1-5-truck carriers that he notes in today’s Overdrive Radio podcast are the board’s primary customers (in addition to the brokers and shippers posting freight there).
Today, the company employs 45 people, hosting tens of thousands of load posts daily for freight moving in hoppers, pneumatic tanks, liquid bulk tanks, end dumps and more. The growth of BulkLoads isn't the instigating reason we spoke to Flinn recently, however. He's also the author of a brand-new series of children’s books, featuring the hauling exploits of one Semi Sam, a freight-hauling tractor personified in the manner of,…
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Dec 9, 2022
Why a hazmat-tank veteran driver went out on her own pulling dry vans: Meet Angelique Temple
Owner-operator Angelique “Tornado” Temple's one-truck Tornado Transport business, based out of Beaverdam, Virginia, follows a two-decade-plus career as a company driver hauling bulk liquid hazmat, much of it spent with Atlantic Bulk Carrier. If her name sounds familiar, it could be for a couple reasons. She sits on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's 2021-established Driver Advisory Subcommittee, for one.
For two, she's the latest inductee in the Howes Hall of Fame recognizing worthy participants in the Trucking and Farming industries that have supported that company now for more than a century.
Owner-operator Temple's story will no doubt strike a chord with anyone in the audience who’s tried to balance a true love of work on the road with pursuits back home, and the frustrations that come with that work, for that matter. One of those was well evident when Temple picked up the phone for our talk -- behind 25 other rigs in a line to get unloaded at a distribution f…
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Dec 2, 2022
On-highway with the 'Bandit': Owner-operator John McCormick's 2021 Kenworth W900L
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, drop into a dry-bulk run in the Working Bobtail, 2015 & Newer category-winning rig in Overdrive's 2022 Pride & Polish competition, owner-operator John McCormick's 'Bandit' 2021 Kenworth W900L. It's the Oakley-leased owner-operator's bread-and-butter haul back and forth between Cresline Plastic Pipe in Henderson, Kentucky, near the McCormick home in Robards, and Westlake Chemical’s PVC complex in Calvert City.
Hooked to one of two Mac pneumatic tank trailers owned by all-owner-operator Oakley Trucking out of North Little Rock, Arkansas, McCormick’s Bandit Kenworth cuts a fine picture, whether offloading PVC powder into one of the silos at Cresline, where they turn that powder into pipe, or hauling along I-69 or 24 or elsewhere between the two principal points for most of his runs.
The 280-inch wheelbase KW features a 565-hp Cummins X15, an 18 speed transmission and 3.36 rears. Utilizing principal supplier Chrome Dome out of Haubstadt, Indiana, o…
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Nov 25, 2022
ELD mandate and crashes -- cause or correlation? Owner-operators weigh safety, training, more
This edition of Overdrive Radio picks up where Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole left on in his reporting from mid-late October around truck-involved crash statistics in the four years prior to, and the four years after, implementation of the FMCSA's electronic logging device mandate, which began in earnest right at the end of 2017: https://www.overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail/article/15301876/crashes-injuries-and-fatalities-up-posteld-mandate
As many listeners and Overdrive readers have likely seen, Cole’s reporting illustrated clearly the generally higher rates of crashes post-mandate, even considering the 2020 year when statistics were way down with the big decline in motorist highway traffic amid the fear and uncertainty of the early COVID pandemic. So there’s a definite correlation between regulatory change in the ELD mandate and those negative safety impacts, but can we really determine there’s a cause there? Hard to say, given so many factors go into the cause of any cra…
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Nov 18, 2022
Back in the saddle, on a mission -- Toby Bogard's journey home, to the road
Now Lansing, Michigan-based operator Toby Bogard is on a mission. That mission is multifold, as you’ll hear in today’s edition of Overdrive Radio, where we catch back up with the driver, now hauling for Heartland Express after about a year and a half away from the road.
Bogard’s return to the road follows a million-plus-mile career prior, and he's newly involved in efforts to push along an idea for something of a feel-good movie narrative about the life and times of a trucker, framed by his last ride home, with the goal of improving the public image of trucking. At least that's among Bogard's principal goals for involvement.
This isn’t Bogard’s first such foray. Regular Overdrive readers may have caught a mention earlier in the week of his Semi-Aware book, designed for teens setting out to get their driver’s license for the first time. It's all about education and appreciation for the work trucking does, and even more specifically just how to maneuver around tractor-trail…
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Nov 11, 2022
Car-haul fleet's back-office backbone got his start as so many do -- behind the wheel
In this edition of Overdrive Radio on Veterans Day, we’re going to get a bit of look at how the nation, and the trucking business, remains a bulwark for opportunity no doubt in part attributable to servicemembers’ many sacrifices through the decades gone by.
We’ll hear from Slava Sobetki, co-owner of the Chicago-area-based Taurus Auto Group car-haul fleet, and who Overdrive profiled as well just yesterday as part of a package of stories that digs into a few relative newcomers to the Transportation Management System platform space: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15302588/tms-platforms-not-just-for-large-fleets
Specifically, such systems -- commonly known by the TMS acronym -- that are increasingly geared toward owner-operators and other small fleets. As the TMS market has matured through the years, such technology is no longer just the province of large motor carriers, as the stories make clear. They feature:
**One-truck TB Trucking and its owners Troy and Hath…
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Nov 4, 2022
Fighting double-brokering fraud: Attorney Hank Seaton on prevention, ways to elevate the issue
Hank Seaton, with the Seaton & Husk law firm, spoke at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies’ annual conference a couple weeks back about what he called Fraud Prevention and Supply Chain Protocol. He offered what he feels is a possible preventive fix to the crime of double brokering when misrepresentation is involved.
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, drop into a long talk with Seaton about somewhat simple steps carriers, brokers and shippers working together can take to stop these schemes in their tracks, whether involving carrier and broker identity theft or the insidious and perhaps more widespread presence of authorized carriers and brokerages set up seemingly for the purpose of simply double-brokering loads: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15302246/fmcsa-and-dot-prioritizing-doublebrokering-schemes
The honest players in trucking simply must work together both to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening, as he sees it, and elevate th…
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Oct 28, 2022
Small Fleet Champs on managing equipment procurement, insurance hikes, diesel volatility, more
In this Overdrive Radio edition, dive into parts of the awards ceremony for Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship, held Thursday, November 20. From a tribute to the great boxing and wrestling ring announcer Michael Buffer to announcement of the competition's winners, the podcast drops most importantly into a roundtable discussion with all four competition finalists.
Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills teed it up with a question: What's been your biggest business challenge of the past year or two, and what have you done to combat it/mitigate effects?
We hear here from:
**11-30-truck division Small Fleet Champ John McGee Trucking, hauling mostly out of the oilfield regionally in Simsboro, Lousiana
**11-30-truck division final round contender Holtkamp Transportation, pulling dry vans coast to coast out of West Point, Iowa.
**3-10-truck division Small Fleet Champ CAP Trucking, hauling LTL reefer out of Sanford, Florida -- regular listeners have heard owner Chris Porricelli before: https://www…
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Oct 21, 2022
Faces of the Road: Betting on the highest common denominator with Road Dog radio's Jimmy Mac
With customary Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills out at the conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies' annual conference today in Nashville, he turns the mic over to contributor, trucker and songwriter Long Haul Paul Marhoefer, who will introduce a trucking-radio personality you may or may not have heard of before who Paul feels is bringing something of a sense of wonder back to trucking radio
That’d be none other than Jimmy Mac, host of Dave Nemo Weekends on the Sirius XM Road Dog channel 146. If you’ve never heard Mac, his show aims to truck drivers in the manner of, as Marhoefer put it, talk radio of say "the mid-20th century," long before the "rock-throwing contest began," as it were. "WGN's Milt Rosenberg from Chicago comes to mind, or maybe Barry Farber of WOR, in New York."
Jimmy Mac, for Long Haul Paul tuning in from the truck operator's seat from a highway somewhere, "was was speaking with us, and he was speaking as if we were actual adults."
That…
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Oct 14, 2022
Trucking in a recession? Owner-operators sound off, messages mixed depending on niche
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we drop back two weeks in time to the site of the Mayberry Truck Show in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, where despite rain threatening from remnants of Hurricane Ian, scads of owners and operators showed out in force for the second annual event at the home location of Bottomley Enterprises.
Our own video editor Lawson Rudisill was out at the show, and, given fairly recent news of negative GDP growth in both the first and second quarters -- one favored rule of thumb for some when it comes to declaring a recession -- and a stock market on a wild ride, mostly down, Rudisill surveyed a variety of owners he caught up with on what they were seeing in their operations.
Answers to the question of just whether owners and operators were seeing indicators in their businesses of a bona fide recession at that moment in time ran the gamut from definitive "yes" to more positive outlooks, based on individual experiences.
One common theme: For those staked…
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Oct 7, 2022
FMCSA's electronic-ID qs, Level 8 wireless inspections, autonomous trucks: Connecting the dots
Former CVSA president Steve Vaughn, currently vice president of field operations for PrePass, stressed asking the tough questions about technology and all the infrastructure put in place to support it when it comes to roadside inspections and over-the-air communication from the truck to law enforcement. Getting answers to those questions, some of which he details in today's edition of Overdrive Radio, will be absolutely key to making any possible rulemakings around electronic ID something industry and enforcement can agree on and benefit from where the rubber meets the road. And hopefully without the unintended consequences that often arise in the rush toward federal implementation of new programs.
Overdrive's Alex Lockie wrote about the electronic-ID comment period currently open in this story from Thursday, October 6, 2022: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15301028/electronic-ids-for-trucks-fact-vs-fiction
PrePass' Vaughn was speaking long before the FMCSA's curr…
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Sep 30, 2022
The spot market slide: Mid-year owner-op numbers illustrate a turn back to leasing, much more
With some of the signs flashing red, as it were, on the prospects of bona fide economic recession, the indicators remained mixed for owner-operator business performance as of a couple weeks ago, the time of ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted's year benchmarking presentation Overdrive originally reported on at this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business/article/15296973/ownerop-revenue-up-big-this-year-but-completely-offset-by-fuel
Hosted will be familiar to regular readers from his earlier-year presentation with Overdrive and our own Gary Buchs at the Mid-America Trucking Show, part of our Partners in Business program: http://overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business
This edition of Overdrive Radio dives in with Hosted for the bulk of his recent distillation of what ATBS has seen throughout year since. Listeners can glean plenty from this audio-only version, but know that a video version is available that includes most of the charts and graphs illustrating year-over-y…
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Sep 23, 2022
Bryon Stoll, survivor: Hindsight's 20/20 after the small fleet owner's heart attack
it’s been a tough few weeks for small fleet owner Bryon Stoll of New London, Wisconsin. In today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Stoll recounts the myriad things that went just right on his evening trip to the hospital for what turned out to be emergency surgery to clear a near total blockage of a coronary artery, the reason for the heart attack the 48-year-old longtime truck owner and operator was experiencing.
Stoll, with his wife, Holly, heads up reefer carrier Surprise Trucking, who we reported on at length earlier this week attendant to Suprise's semifinalist recognition as part of Overdrive 2022 Small Fleet Championship: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15115044/suprise-truckings-long-road-to-resurrection
It’s a more dead-serious topic that dominates Stoll’s story today, though. If you don’t have your life, of course, the day-to-day concerns of a trucking business are but a luxury you’ll never afford.
The Stolls know that in a very…
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Sep 16, 2022
Used-truck warranty evolution, coverage improvements, and what to consider when evaluating
Wade Bontrager, CEO of National Truck Protection, came to the now more than four-decade provider of used-truck warranties to owner-operators and small fleets owners around the time of NTP's 2018 purchase of Premium 2000, a fellow used-warranty provider. The following years have seen a systematic improvement process for the company, which still offers both NTP and Premium 2000 warranty brands but with a close focus on transparent contracts and more customer-beneficial practices that Bontrager lays out in this podcast.
We dig in here, too, with some of the themes unearthed by Overdrive’s own News Editor Matt Cole in a three-part feature about the evolution of the used-truck warranty market. That feature wrapped up yesterday, September 15, at OverdriveOnline.com: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15296811/usedtruck-warranty-dynamics-on-the-move-in-response-to-criticism
We hear a lot more from Wade Bontrager, too. His arrival at National Truck Protection in 2018 ushered…
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Sep 9, 2022
A stolen truck, a freight scam and a big re-evaluation on the road to small fleet success
When Florida-based small fleet owner Chris Porricelli started his CAP Trucking company as a one-truck business, he was still in his 20s, and struggled for the first six months. But 11 years into it today, the five-truck fleet has excelled in North-South LTL reefer lanes with mostly direct customers for produce headed north from Florida and South Georgia, and a bevy of commodities headed south.
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, hear Porricelli's story in his own words, with part of our conversation with the owner attendant to his company’s semi-finalist recognition in Overdrive’s 2022 Small Fleet Championship: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15296127/cap-trucking-refocuses-asset-business-in-ltl-reefer
CAP Trucking is one of five semi-finalists in the 3-10-truck category for the program this year, with five more contenders also in the 11-30-truck category.
Last week, Overdrive started running stories about all 10 of the fleets (with four live so far) an…
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Sep 2, 2022
Get ready for the downturn -- it's always right around the corner
In this Part 2 edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast featuring conversations with Owner-Operator of the Year Glen Horack, the Missouri-based hauler elaborates on themes of preparation broached in Part 1 last week. Asked for his most salient advice for any new or aspiring owner in this day and age, he made reference to the grand cyclical nature of the economy -- and trucking specifically of course. What goes up must come down.
The owner-operator, leased with his 2022 Peterbilt 579 to Springfield, Missouri-headquartered Prime Inc., was speaking in June and noted market dynamics then evident that suggested to him the turn was either at hand or right around the corner.
Through Prime's driver app, "They send us a message every day ... as to what fuel's going to do at midnight," he said, advance notice of pending price changes for effective foresight for purchase decisions. At that time in June when we talked, he noted diesel had been occasionally going "down for one or two days. Then it'…
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Aug 26, 2022
'Knock on wood,' owner-op of the year Glen Horack's money-making ways set to grow
This edition of Overdrive Radio features Owner-Operator of the Year Glen Horack, based in Elkland, Missouri, and so named in Overdrive’s coproduction of the awards program with the Truckload Carriers Association at the TCA annual conference in March in Las Vegas. Horack teams with his wife, Karla, a hauling partnership whose in-cab portion at least started after the one year -- 'knock on wood," Horack said -- his one-truck business truly struggled, 2008. The depths of the Great Recession.
Running team in the aftermath, as you’ll hear in this part 1 of 2 featuring Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills' June 2022 conversations the Horacks, the pair came out from under debt taken on as freight fell off quickly. It's a testament to the owners’ ability to adjust their reefer-hauling operation alongside three-decade partners in Prime, Inc., out of Springfield, Missouri, where they're still leased.
Hear both speak to the business, the experience of training each other (of a fashion) when Ka…
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Aug 19, 2022
Listen back: The 20% rule -- how brake adjustment violations can put your truck out of service
Ahead of Brake Safety Week 2022, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance weeklong outreach and inspection initiative focused on braking systems and starting this Sunday, Aug. 21, we're listening back to the 2021 Overdrive Radio podcast talk with Pennsylvania-based former local-department officer and long-certified DOT inspector Andy Blair. Looking at the landscape for commercial truck inspections generally, Blair sees plenty missed opportunities when it comes to troopers helping truckers to understand out-of-service violations. All too frequently, violations that put an owner-op or other driver out of service simply aren't explained at the point of inspection. Too many trucking companies large and small don't invest in the CVSA out-of-service criteria handbook, the only place you'll find those criteria in all their minutiae, according to Blair.
The equipment category that takes up the largest number of pages therein? Brakes, of course, and specifically clamp-type drum brakes. In this e…
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Aug 12, 2022
The expert songwriting of Ky.-based hauler Coby Langham -- and a special truck, on a special day
Today we hand it off again to "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer to walk us through the moving, sometimes hilarious, writing of trucker-songwriter Coby Langham & the Citizen Band, whose 2019 “Years on the Road” record made plenty waves around his native Kentucky and beyond. Langham drives for likewise Kentucky-headquartered Downey & Sons, a pallet supplier out of Springfield, and he’s a proud father of three.
Hear more of Langham's music via this link: https://open.spotify.com/album/3c5Vvtgk1sEhmGYgRxOaN0?si=FUHOKkIjRG-lBsnruRh4-g&nd=1
Also in the podcast, Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie's interview of Arien Ruell around his beautiful 800-horsepower, 1993 vintage Peterbilt 379, with a spectacular 80s-built sleeper and custom stretch that hauls mostly overweight, sometimes oversize, loads out of Pennsylvania to points west and South. Lockie caught up with owner-operator Ruell at the GearJammer show two weeks back in New Hampshire. It's a special truck, for Ruell something of a mo…
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Aug 5, 2022
Remembering owner-operators Mark Mills, Jeff Seales on tough week for show hauler Clark Transfer
This edition of Overdrive Radio features a talk with Charlie Deull, third generation in the family behind longtime Broadway show hauler (among other touring acts) Clark Transfer, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Today, the company is principal in touring work all around the nation hauled by owner-operators leased on to the company, in addition to a network of outside agents, including many owner-ops and small fleets with authority among them, too.
Deull we spoke to initially this Spring, and some since, about the company’s efforts to bounce back from the big hit the COVID-19 pandemic put on the business. Coming out of it in the last year or so as big touring acts have returned in earnest, the company’s changed up parts of its contractor compensation package in unique ways. Clark is among the very, very few carriers out there offering a minimum guaranteed revenue to owners who lease there, for one, and for two, guaranteeing their fuel surcharge as a backstop for the less-fuel-eff…
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Jul 29, 2022
Independents/private fleets connection engine, a haul for breast cancer, and a legend remembered
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we'll drop into an interview Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole conducted with Arrive Logistics Chief Strategy Officer J-Ann Tio, about the broker-3PL’s “We Deliver Flexibility” program. The trial run for the program is getting its footing as a connection engine between independent owner-operators and small fleets in Arrive’s network and larger private fleets the company also does business with.
The Arrive program, as Tio notes, hopes to alleviate issues on both sides of the coin, for owner-operators enduring the deflationary rates environment in the spot market and for private fleets needing safe and professional capacity. It could well be a way into new opportunities for owners both inside and out of Arrive’s network, as Tio describes it, in fact -- a chance to develop new contracts for freight with large clients that might typically not have much of an interest doing direct business with smaller fleets.
There’s more in today…
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Jul 26, 2022
Tank operator Guy Archer on the roll, trucking with new music
Dayton, Ohio-based Airgas tank-truck operator Guy Archer has come out of his big win in 2021's Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search with renewed energy around his songwriting efforts -- he’s been much more than tinkering around the edges of those efforts with some recording activity this year we’ll hear him detail in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, dropping in on Archer’s tour of a variety of songwriter stages at the Mid-America Trucking Show this past March.
There, Archer delighted crowds who showed out to see our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer, among others, and Archer enjoyed a featured performance at the big Red Eye Radio stage in the main lobby, where he opened with, what else, his Talent Search-winning "Heavy Load" original.
The tour around MATS followed an invite to the RoadPro Brands dinner there, which spurred him to make the decision to trek to Louisville for his first time at the show in more than 20 years.
In the podcast, hear a talk with him…
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Jul 15, 2022
Drive to small-biz trucking success -- living and learning, pride of ownership on offer at Walcott
Gary Buchs -- longtime Overdrive contributor, former owner-operator now turned business coach for a myriad of both new and more experienced owners -- knows well of what he speaks with regard to the notion that first-time small business owners are like as not to fail that first time out. There's a reason he's where he is today after a successful owner-operator career, after all -- his first foray as a young man in agriculture didn't go quite so well.
Initial failure doesn't mean, of course, that the drive to success stops in its tracks, and what he’s finding this week in that regard on-site at the Walcott Truckers Jamboree in Iowa is the principal subject for this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast.
"In this country, I don't see us ever losing that drive to become that small owner of a business," Buchs said. "It's our culture."
Buchs spoke to several recently former owners who'd "gotten a truck, had an accident" or other mishap that put them out of business "because of the hard…
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Jul 8, 2022
Two show-ready rigs -- and owners -- moving toward retirement in style: Meet Bruce and Kellie Cone
The subject of retirement is always a hot topic among owner-ops -- the diligence it requires to set yourself up well to leave the road is such that it's not exactly easily achievable. Yet this well-matched pair of owner-operators -- Bruce and Kellie Cone of Redding, California -- have set themselves up well as they start to run out their last half-decade in business. That's the long-range plan, anyway, for the proud of owners of a pristine pair of Peterbilt 389s you'll hear all about in this edition of Overdrive Radio.
It jumps off with the sound of the antique train bell that’s mounted under the deck of owner-operator Kellie Cone’s 2022 Peterbilt 389. The bell’s activated by the in-cab switch that formerly controlled the sliding fifth wheel – which slides no longer, as you’ll hear her tell. Kellie comes from an education background career-wise, originally, but several years back met Bruce and took to trucking in an outsize way originally on ridealong trips in-cab with the t…
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Jun 24, 2022
OTR to home: Making local trucking work with Mike 'The Boston Trucker' Gaffin, Terry Shelton
It was 2017 when Mike Gaffin, aka "The Boston Trucker," received an email from Shell Rotella SuperRigs inviting him to join their team. Over the past several years, Gaffin, a second-generation operator with more than 30 years of experience behind the wheel, had been converting his lifetime love of trucking, and a decades long photographic curation of the business, into one of the largest followings on social media. His likes and views run into the tens of millions, driven largely by his huge Youtube collection: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBostonTrucker
Still, Gaffin initially dismissed Rotella's proposal as a crank email.
But after a phone call, it turned out the offer was legitimate. Gaffin, who still trucks full-time doing local work for A. Cardillo and Sons in Waltham, Massachusetts, has joined the Rotella SuperRigs team at select shows throughout the country ever since.
Overdrive contributor Long Haul Paul Marhoefer caught up with Gaffin at the Mid-America Trucking Show bac…
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Jun 17, 2022
What if you didn't need 10 after 11 or 14 in the hours of service? Lee Schmitt aims to find out
For this edition of Overdrive Radio, host Todd Dills is joined by Lee and Lisa Schmitt of Wisconsin. As regular readers may well be aware, Lee's requested as exemption from parts of the hours of service for himself -- it’s the first such exemption request for an individual owner we’ve seen hit the Federal Register and go up for comment, in quite some time, a testament perhaps to the methodical nature of the Schmitts' pursuit of it. It’s not like it's particularly difficult, though, to break through the dam, as it were, of the federal regulatory system, as Lisa notes in the podcast.
Exemption requests and what's required of them are laid in the regs themselves, in 49 CFR 381.310.
Having essentially followed the instructions laid out there, the Schmitts' request was posted to the Federal Register and put up for comment last week, and since then 600 comments have been filed. But there’s been some confusion among some in the Overdrive audience about just what Lee Schmitt is askin…
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Jun 10, 2022
California trucking crossroads: $7 fuel, AB 5 and a special truck show in the offing
Small fleet car-haul owner-operator C.G. Soza of California's Central Valley has quite a lot on his plate these days, not the least of which is the $7-plus diesel sign he saw early this week in Madera, California, a first for the owner. He's also keeping a close eye on the Supreme Court, which is set to conference June 23 and possibly make its decision as to whether it will take up federal pre-emption questions in the California Trucking Association's appeal of its case again the AB 5 state contractor law's application to trucking.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t take up the case, that day could be quite eventuful for Soza and scads of other small fleet owners who, like Soza, contract with leased owner-operators -- and plenty California-based leased owner-operators themselves, of course.
As if they didn’t already have enough to contend with when it comes to business difficulties in the now extremely-high-fuel state.
June 23 also happens to be a set-up day for Soza's A.J. Soza Memor…
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Jun 1, 2022
What a three-year expediter and 2021 Small Fleet Champ Jason Cowan have in common
The question begged in the title here points us down the road to the subject of this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, a notion voiced quite well also in last week's edition by Breon Thomas when he noted that entrepreneurship, broadly, is about creating systems of support for your efforts at success in business. Systems, indeed, of support to ensure you negotiate the next load at a level of profit commensurate to keep the business afloat, feed and clothe and shelter the family back home, and leave plenty to invest in the future.
If it’s growth that you’re after, beyond a single truck -- or cargo van, the case is in Thomas's world -- you won't get a much better example of systems-focused pursuit of success than the 2021 Small Fleet Champ, Silver Creek Transportation and its leader, Jason Cowan.
Cowan's investment in people and data-engagement systems underpins a company culture that’s about well more than operating at a profit. His example speaks to the value of the right…
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May 24, 2022
Limits to the cargo-van hustle: Bre the Xpediter stresses business-systems value to break through
The nimble nature of businesses working the expediting niche of the trucking world, particularly those powered by smaller pieces of equipment like cargo vans, is well-known to longtime industry participants. Atlanta-based Breon Thomas was initially attracted to cargo van expediting for that very reason, yet he quickly learned there was more to successful business ownership than working hard and running miles.
Today, after telling his story and sharing with others frequently on social media, "Bre the Xpediter" Thomas is driven by a passion to give a hand up to the next generation of owners from his community coming up behind him. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, the Chattanooga, Tennessee-born cargo van hauler recounts his journey from early battles with dyslexia to a military career and the tough transition back to civilian life. It's there, though, that he located a significant aptitude for serving as a kind of translator of the language of business/entrepreneurship to the aspi…
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May 13, 2022
How politics/PR cloud 'zero emissions trucks' reality -- digging into recent ATRI analysis
Does a truly "zero-emissions" truck exist? Is it even possible in today's petroleum-powered world? Will it ever be?
If you’ve counted yourself among skeptics when it comes to the notion that trucking might one day be an industry built on the foundation of big lithium-ion batteries powering electric motors, Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole's report this week on new analysis from the American Transportation Research Instituate, or ATRI, probably raised your eyebrows a little higher, let’s say: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15291919/environmental-impact-of-batteryelectric-class-8-trucks
ATRI compared estimated life-cycle CO2 greenhouse gas emissions associated with battery electric trucks, diesel trucks, and hydrogen fuel cell trucks from production through to operation and ultimate disposal and found skeptics might well be justifiably skeptical.
Life-cycle emissions were highest over time for diesels, as Cole reported, but ultimately not by an amount implied by…
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May 6, 2022
Fuel-market insanity: A tale of two loads, bedrock cost control, rates-management tactics
It’s official –- well, it’s been official for a good while now -– fuel is absolutely out of hand. Spot market rates for vans and reefers have been sinking, and big carriers nonetheless seem bullish on long-term prospects, for once in the last couple of years. These years have been a boon by and large for the small, even with COVID-inspired difficulties: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15115093/how-small-fleets-might-benefit-from-a-covid-vaxtest-mandate
Market-to-market, though, there are plenty of freight and rate have-and-have-not dynamics to go around.
An object lesson came via a conversation this week with owner-operator Mike “Mustang” Crawford. The owner-operator, whose Mustang’s Trucking business reached the 4 million safe miles mark above the frame of a single truck last week, told the story of a roundtrip with intracompany picks and drops at the same facilities on either end of the lane between Harvey, Illinois, and Phoenix. From Harvey, the al…
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Apr 29, 2022
'All drivers': Support, recruiting inclusivity highlight mission of LGBTQ+ Truck Driver Network
Cliffside Transportation Services operator Bobby Coffey-Loy hauls in a team with his husband, Ricky, and in one of a couple dozen or so rigs Cliffside has dedicated to XPO Logistics freight in the network. In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Coffey-Loy speaks to the mission of his and cofounders’ LGBTQ+ Truck Driver Network, established within the last year and engaged in a variety of support efforts for operators all around the nation: https://lgbtqtruckdrivernetwork.com/
Ricky and Bobby Coffey-Loy haul pharmaceuticals in a 2020 Volvo VNL outfitted with a 156-inch big-bunk ARI sleeper, not the only one in the fleet at Cliffside Transportation Services. Since getting acclimated to big-bunk trucking, Bobby's found the rig to be something of a literal life-changer. He's gone from 300-plus pounds down to around 240 in a fairly short time, with a focus on cooking for himself, as also detailed in the podcast.
Here, sit on a conversation Overdrive had with Coffey-Loy at the 5…
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Apr 22, 2022
How this hauler for some of the biggest names in popular music survived COVID
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, trucker-songwriter and Overdrive Extra contributing writer "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer takes us through his interview at the Mid-America Trucking Show last month with longtime entertainment-industry-specialized trucker Chip Warterfield, now in a safety and operations role with Upstaging, Inc. Warterfield tells the story of what happened to the company when COVID in 2020 essentially brought every single one of its touring clients to an abrupt and complete halt.
Warterfield also speaks of his own trucking beginnings back in the 1980s. If Warterfield’s name sounds familiar, you may have caught his story of an early trucking mentor, Kenny Jones, the father of Barbara Mandrell’s then steel guitar player, Mike Jones. Kenny spent his entire career trucking in some form or another and taught Warterfield perhaps more than he knew back at that time: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15290773/a-trucking-tribute-to-kenny-jones-invalu…
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Apr 15, 2022
Meet your regulator -- FMCSA chief Robin Hutcheson -- and post-PIB biz talk, part 2
It’s "meet your regulator" day on Overdrive Radio -- there’s plenty to gain, particularly for those of you in the audience who engage with regulatory processes, in getting to know, of a fashion, FMCSA Acting Administrator Robin Hutcheson. For this edition of the podcast, we’ll hear Hutcheson speak at length to the notion of dwindling pride in trucking and investment in its restoration, plenty about her background, FMCSA's regulatory programs, and the agency's parking advocacy role, among other topics. It's all part of a talk she gave with reporters from trucking media to answer pre-submitted questions at the Mid-American Trucking Show last month.
While there wasn’t much in the way of hard news that emerged from the session, hear it in full today. Find a previously-published report from the session at this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15290156/fmcsas-new-boss-emphasizes-compensation-detention-issues
Then, perhaps more importantly, we’ll pick up w…
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Apr 11, 2022
Why truck drivers get into business as owner-operators
As Georgia-headquartered owner-operator Raeshawn Lucas has it, higher earning potential as an owner-operator is certainly a prime motivating factor for the decision to strike out on one's own as a business in trucking. Yet that's certainly not all when it comes bedrock goals.
Respect, freedom of choice in so many aspects of how you do business... Truth is, owner-operators go into business for themselves for all sorts of reasons, and that was well evident in the discussion we had at the Mid-America Trucking Show with owner-operator Lucas, leased under a longtime friend and associate's authority; Landstar-leased David Nihart, who's worn a variety of trucking hats over a long career so far; and Pete Anderson of Georgetown, Texas, a vocational fleet manager with plans to move into over-the-road as a small fleet owner.
That conversation followed Overdrive’s Partners in Business seminar at MATS with ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted and Overdrive’s own Gary Buchs, both of whom you'll als…
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Apr 1, 2022
Out on 'The Big Road' with a new podcast, small fleet TMS for back-office/operator management
It's been quite a while since the Overdrive Radio podcast has attempted to capture the vast dynamism of a trucking show quite like the one that took place for the first time in three years in Kentucky last week -- that's the Mid-America Trucking Show, MATS for short, of course. It'll be quite some time before we convey the full breadth of everything encountered there, but for today on this April Fool's Day edition of the Overdrive Radio we'll get to two aspects: first with the voice of a brand-new podcast, none other than a longtime operator now operating a custom trucking video company, James "Tex" Crowley, out now with the intro episode of 'The Big Road' you can hear in full in today's edition. The show is inspired in part by his career behind the wheel, and a real passion for trucking, generally, as you'll hear.
Before we get there, though, a look at one among scads of new Transportation Management Systems geared toward the smallest of carriers popping up around the trucking techno…
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Mar 25, 2022
Meet the Owner-Operator of the Year -- a window on the Las Vegas awards banquet
While we're busy covering the various comings and goings at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, this week, find in this week's podcast a window on the big awards banquet out in Las Vegas earlier in the week with the Truckload 2022 conference of the Truckload Carriers Association.
There, Prime-leased Glen Horack took home the Owner-Operator of the Year award, making good on his fourth time as an award finalist.
Robert Howell, driver for Doug Andrus Distributing, took home the Company Driver of the Year award.
You can find plenty more in terms of scenes from the event via the Wednesday report at https://www.overdriveonline.com/owner-operator-of-the-year/article/15290016/owneroperator-takes-home-25k-with-top-honor
But for this edition of Overdrive Radio, sit back and take it all in as we run through the stories of six finalists, three each in owner-operator and company driver categories. How it works is, after an introduction by new TCA president Jim Ward, the candid…
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Mar 18, 2022
'Unpopular opinions' on the Entry Level Training regs newly in effect last month
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Trucker Nation's Andrea Marks voices what she says might be "unpopular" opinions about some operators' views around the new Entry Level Driver Training regulations, in effect since early February. Marks, also involved in the small fleet operations of her parents' and husband’s small trucking companies pulling livestock from a Colorado home base, calls herself a "huge proponent" of the new training regs, and though much of the trucking world, including owner-operators, was with her there. Yet there’s at once a strong undercurrent of antipathy to the regs among some drivers and owner-operators –- of a couple of different flavors.
One argument says the training regs don’t go far enough. They don’t mandate on trainers and trainees a specific amount of behind the wheel instruction in the form of a number of hours to meet, for instance. Rather, the regs base assessment on proficiency, on a trainee’s ability to perform the tasks req…
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Mar 11, 2022
A truckin' start: Owner-Op of the Year finalists Glen Horack, Gene Houchin, Allen & Sandy Smith
Every owner-op out there has an origin story for his or her entry into the trucking business, whether simple or windingly complicated ... or embellished for effect, as it were. That's no less true of this year's Owner-Operator of the Year award finalists, one of whom will take home $25,000 as this year's winner after the March 22 awards banquet at the Truckload Carriers Association's Truckload 2022 conference in Las Vegas.
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we’ll hear such tales and much more from all three of the competing nominees, including award finalist five-timer Glen Horack, leased to Prime: https://www.overdriveonline.com/owner-operator-of-the-year/article/15288620/teamwork-helps-drive-owneroperator-glen-horacks-success
Iowa-based owner-operator Gene Houchin, leased to Midwest Express: https://www.overdriveonline.com/owner-operator-of-the-year/article/15289162/owneroperator-award-finalist-gene-houchin
And National Carriers-leased, West Virginia-based Allen and Sandy Smit…
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Mar 3, 2022
Will the national emergency declaration's COVID hours of service waiver extend again?
The “People’s Convoy” continues to roll toward the area of the nation’s capital, at upward of 100 trucks as of yesterday, with multiple hundreds more personal vehicles as of Thursday, March 3, on a route to Ohio before a final trip into the D.C. area planned for Saturday this weekend.
The convoy, as we’ve noted at Overdrive, has a stated aim of ending the national emergency footing on which the U.S. government has found itself the last two years as it relates to COVID: https://www.overdriveonline.com/life/article/15288864/us-convoy-aims-to-end-national-emergency-covid-declaration
Those kinds of emergency declarations bring with them new discretionary funding opportunities for federal agencies to direct to states, the ability to impose restrictions in some instances -– in the U.S. that’s primary been seen at the local and state levels when comes to restrictions on travel and gatherings, particularly early on in the pandemic but continuing in some measures today. At the f…
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Feb 17, 2022
'Advanced ELD auditing': How small fleets, independents can work to prevent adverse safety ratings
As was noted in reporting last week, compliance consultants Jeff Davis (Fleet Safety Services) and Adam Wingfield (Innovative Logistics Group each pointed out that, despite the hopes of some, electronic logging devices have emphatically not delivered carriers from hours-related enforcement, particularly at the investigatory level when federal and state auditors come calling. A small fleet's own audits of drivers’ e-logs for unassigned miles and much, much more are still necessary tasks for the back office, even for one-truck independents with more direct on-highway control of their own e-logging destiny.
If you missed it last week, after you get through today’s edition of Overdrive Radio featuring a talk from Davis on this very subject, take a run through our report about carrier audit activity: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15288352/the-conditional-safety-rating-the-most-common-in-2021
With stats pulled early this month, it’s clear the Federal Motor Carri…
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Feb 11, 2022
The 'Freedom Convoy' protest, with Canadian cross-border owner-op Mike Murchison
If you’ve been seeing news this week and last from North of the border and wondering just what’s happening there with the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests, soon entering their third week in Canada, hear a long take on it all in today's edition of Overdrive Radio. Alberta, Canada-headquartered owner-operator Mike Murchison is not a direct participant in those protests but a clear-eyed watcher of what’s going on in Canadian trucking and society, generally speaking.
He narrates his hauls and so much more via the Road Warrior News publication, out of Toronto, and operates principally in the Western parts of both Canada and the United States, wholly dependent on cross-border freight for his business' success. Read some of his stories, and hear a song he wrote inspired by the early parts of the protests via this link: https://roadwarriornews.com/category/mike-murchison-rwn/
Much of today's podcast derives from a conversation with Murchison early this week on Tuesday, February…
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Feb 4, 2022
The FBI needs your help solving this cold-case murder, and: Inside FMCSA's under-21 interstate pilot
Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Ann Alexander in today's edition of Overdrive Radio talks about her Little Rock office's push this week in hopes of gathering leads into the 2006 murder of 19-year-old Tracy Owana Jones, who disappeared in November that year from a Little Rock area truck stop where she’d been a somewhat regular at the time attempting to collect magazine subscriptions.
Jones was last seen on November 15, 2006, a Wednesday, at the Pilot Travel Center at the Galloway exit off I-40 east of Little Rock. Her body was found more than a week later on Sunday, November 26, in a field off I-40 in Memphis, Tennessee.
Alexander and others in the FBI team indicate here just how you might be able to help if details of the case jog your memory of her from that time. There’s a new $25,000 dollar reward for information that leads to a conviction. Those with tips can contact Ann Alexander via the FBI Little Rock field office at 501-221-9100 or dial 800-CALL-FBI.
Find…
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Jan 28, 2022
'Not really what we need': Training regs may miss the mark, but this small fleet's doing it right
Pre-CDL prospective truck drivers as of February 7 will have to use either a private or for-hire training provider registered in FMCSA's new Training Provider Registry to receive likewise newly required training before taking the skills test to get their CDL. The implementation of the so-called Entry Level Driver Training regs follows nearly a decade of development, following rulemaking by committee years ago now with a wide array of trucking and training stakeholders with a seat at the table. Conversations then were often skeptical of old apprenticeship-training ways truly surviving implementation, yet companies like Bountiful, Utah-based small fleet Ralph Smith Co. have prepped for the new reg by putting themselves into the nearly-ready-to-go-live Provider Registry in order to fit their longstanding programs with the new rules.
Longtime hauler Harry Smith, now in operations and training at Ralph Smith Co., is this Overdrive Radio episode's guest. The company hauls sand and gravel as…
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Jan 21, 2022
Marine Corps to trucking, martial arts, music, family: Meet Owner-Op of the Year Bryan Smith
The Overdrive 2021 Owner-Operator of the Year, chosen among finalists in the program we partner with the Truckload Carriers Association to produce, is nothing if nothing multifaceted in his pursuits both inside and out of the cab of his 2016 Freightliner Coronado, the fifth tractor owned in his three-decade history behind the wheel.
In this special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, talk a long walk with owner-operator Bryan Smith through his trucking beginnings after operating heavy equipment in the Marine Corps, his solid net income performance these last two topsy-turvy years, his musical talents and martial arts instruction back at home in the Dubuque, Iowa, area, and so much more.
What emerges is clarity of just why he was chosen for the award. It's well-rounded men and women like him who drive the trucking business forward by example, with bedrock expertise, innovation and true commitment to those in their orbits.
Read more about Smith via this feature profile: https://ww…
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Jan 14, 2022
Trucking exit strategies, 'The Great Resignation' and a 'Face of the Road' with author Michael Perry
Serious question: How do you know when it's time to hang it up?
I'm Paul Marhoefer, and I'll be your host for today's special edition of Overdrive Radio. I'm 62 now, and I keep catching myself devising an exit strategy from the life of a full-time trucker. After all, there's $1,500/month in rocking-chair money just waiting for me downtown at the Social Security office. There have been phone conferences with our CPA, as well as just a little too much screen time gawking over Youtube videos with titles like "Retire Early / $800 a Month / Boquete, Panama."
Truth is, I never planned on getting this old this soon. Watching my own dad continue to work well into his 70s had me shooting for octogenarian-trucker status. But lately? Not so much. Two of my closest friends in this business died in recent months, and they weren't that much older than me. And there have been a couple significant medical setbacks of my own, one of which was life-threatening.
In the new dystopia of closed restrooms…
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Jan 7, 2022
With whorls of history: Paul Marhoefer's new record, 'Corn Belt Cafe'
Early on in this Overdrive Radio edition showcasing trucker-songwriter "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer's new "Corn Belt Cafe" long-player, the Overdrive Extra contributor describes standing at the register of a roadside diner somewhere in Illinois on Labor Day in the early 1980s. "Right in front of the counter there was a worn spot in the linoleum," Marhoefer said, and "standing in the blackness of that worn spot in the linoleum ... was one of those moments where you’re surprised by a sense of bliss."
It was as if Marhoefer "had entered the portal of some one-ness," he said, a sense of being a part of a living history, of a fashion. "That’s something you don’t talk about if you’re a straight-truck driver from Indiana," as Marhoefer was at the time, though the memory stuck with him through the years.
So many of those old roadside diners are gone, as is so much else, and you get the sense listening to "Corn Belt Cafe" that Marhoefer feels keenly the loss, a pervasive sense that perm…
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Dec 31, 2021
A final 14 -- plus a 3-hour pause -- to count down to 2022: HOS, in-cab cooks, roadside trends...
Happy New Year to all of you! For this final day of 2021, we've got a special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast to count down to 2022 with a run back through our most-listened-to episodes of the year. That'd be a final 14 -- plus a 3-hour pause, say -- for a lucky 17 of our 2021 editions of the podcast.
We’re going to hear about the hours of service – particularly in the context of the COVID-19 emergency declaration and its hours waiver, now in place in some form for almost two years. We’ll hear about custom project rigs and restorations, about California’s AB 5 contractor law, now headed to the Supreme Court, about COVID and in-sourcing and cooking in-cab and on the road, as we count down the hours.
The year-in-review Overdrive Radio episode here works out to a reality-rules/sometimes-bites window on what truck owners were most concerned about over the course of the year.
We've grouped Nos. 1-17 of the most-listened episodes excerpted there in reverse order in a playli…
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Dec 23, 2021
A tale of two loads of Kentucky tornado relief collected, distributed, with owner-op Daniel Koors
The night of Friday, December 10, was a stressful one for legions of Americans across the mid-South as tornado sirens blared, with everybody and their brother no doubt gathered around whatever mess they might have, or not have, in their basements.
Owner-operator Daniel Koors of Indiana was up late monitoring storms’ progress himself that night – as you’ll hear in today’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. Though the destruction to his South in Kentucky was readily apparent that night, the next morning owner-operator Koors felt motivated even further to help when daylight shone on just how devastating it was.
Koors got a call from a fellow operator based in Lexington, and, some calls later, was on his way there with a dry van in tow to collect relief supplies and cash to distribute wherever it was needed. The operation continued for a full week, ultimately, as Koors told it.
The friend who’d put out the call to Koors for potential use of the truck was Lexington-based Ja…
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Dec 17, 2021
'Power only' as a springboard for owner-operator growth: Tim DeWitt's 34-truck fleet
Tim DeWitt is no short-term-minded person, as he says in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, charting how the small fleet owner’s begun to make good on on long-term goals of improving the conditions under which his now more than 30 driver employees operate. And: to continue to achieve solid profitability. He's doing it with his authority as DeWitt Transportation, based in Southern Illinois, and without owning a single trailer.
In the podcast, lean more closely into DeWitt’s operation, detailed in part in Overdrive's recent three-part feature series covering the wild growth in power-only opportunities for owners with motor carrier authority. You can find that series in full at this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15286059/how-covid-fasttracked-poweronly-opportunity-growth-in-trucking
There are many reasons for opportunity growth in that operating segment, where a truck owner runs a carrier business with authority but doesn’t bring an owned trailer to t…
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Dec 10, 2021
Trucker-songwriter Guy Archer's journeys with heavy loads, right back to Nashville
From a songwriting session in early 2019 with Nashville-based John Allan Miller, Airgas company driver Guy Archer, based in Dayton, Ohio, determined to get back to Music City to continue work in songwriting later that same year. Yet a back injury derailed that plan, then COVID happened in 2020, and getting back into his truck after unloading one night Archer happened to hear an advertisement early in 2021 for the Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search.
As many regular listeners will know, Archer went on to win the competition, and early in November, he was back in Nashville at the Jay’s Place recording studio with producer-engineer Jay Vernali laying down five of his original tracks, all of which you can listen to via this playlist he was kind enough to share with us: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/2021-trucker-talent-search-winner-guy-archers-prize-recording-session
For this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we’ll take a tour through some of those result…
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Nov 29, 2021
Small fleet roundtable: Co-opetition, balancing personal/business pursuits, tech challenges, more
Small Fleet Champ Silver Creek Transportation’s leader Jason Cowan speaks earlier on in this edition of Overdrive Radio to what he sees as an essential challenge in the highly competitive trucking industry for small fleet owners looking to lead by example and balance that competition with a rising-tide-floats-all-boats kind of mentality.
Trucking companies can do more, he said, do embrace cooperation amongst their kind, where it makes sense, to get the job done without hampering future opportunities for all around trucking.
In a nutshell: "I'd rather have your friendship than have your freight," he said, though such a spirit of 'co-opetition' is of course more complicated than that. Cowan and his wife and business partner, Penny, were joined for this roundtable discussion around owner-op and small fleet issues by fellow Small Fleet Champ finalists Robert and Karen Hallahan of Hallahan Transport and Nick Hewitt of Professional Transportation Services, Inc. All spelled out examples -…
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Nov 19, 2021
The promise -- and challenges -- of the car-haul trucking niche
In this edition of Overdrive Radio ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, we're taking time to engage with two independent car haulers – Indiana-based owner-operator David Bunting and Ellenwood, Georgia's Eric Turner, owner of small fleet Turner Transport, both of whom have mastered the niche in spite of current auto-market challenges. Those challenges were discussed in-depth with them and others in Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole's three-part deep dive into car hauling, which you can read via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15280473/automarket-turmoil-is-putting-squeeze-on-car-haulers
There are plenty other car-haul challenges in a normal time, too, including per-vehicle-moved rates that don't always fluctuate with fuel the way a truck owner might want them to. There's varying heights of trailers loaded on two levels with differing types of vehicles, presenting bridge-strike danger around different parts of the country.
Yet for the self-starting, self-reli…
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Nov 11, 2021
Inside the veterans-support mission of MSR Transport with active duty servicemember Rob Ahlers
In this Veterans Day 2021 special edition of Overdrive Radio, we sat down with active-duty servicemember and small fleet owner Rob Ahlers, currently serving under the Chief of Logistics for the Pentagon out of D.C. With two military vets as partners, Ahlers launched the private MSR Transport Services with an intention to help fellow vets transition to civilian careers in trucking, and since the start in 2014 MSR's up to more than 30 power units, some owner-operated, hauling mostly expedited and Department of Defense freight with the fleet.
MSR is the latest recipient of Daimler Trucks' Cleveland, North Carolina plant's Ride of Pride series of patriotically decorated rigs, a 2022 Western Star 5700 XE pictured in the thumbnail with this podcast -- find more pictures from MSR via the post that houses this podcast: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15281342
What's Veterans Day mean to you? For Ahlers, in part it’s opportunity to continue to provide gainful employment to a bevy of militar…
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Nov 8, 2021
'Fun' with safety/compliance: Low-hanging fruit to avoid drug/alcohol Clearinghouse violations
Helping carriers dealing with the 'fun' that can come with safety and compliance during federal or state audits is at least a good part of the life of Fleet Safety Services consultant Jeff Davis, the principal voice in this edition of Overdrive Radio. After starting in trucking as a driver, Davis eventually made a career helping mostly small motor carriers through those compliance reviews.
At the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies this past week in Nashville, Davis offered information into new audit activity related to the relatively new drug and alcohol testing results Clearinghouse maintained by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration -- and common slip-ups carriers are making with required pre-employment and other checks there.
Too many, he said, are getting dinged by auditors for violations that are ultimately easily prevented, as he tells it. There’s a lot happening in terms of the Clearinghouse, too, that Davis rounds up in what f…
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Oct 29, 2021
Behind the wheel with automated-driving start-up safety driver Ruben Cardenas
Ruben Cardenas is one of the haulers involved with the Plus company, among the scads of tech companies dipping their toes into freight hauling as they work on ever-more-technically-capable advanced driver assist systems. And Plus isn't shy about using marketing terminology like "self-driving" and "autonomous driving" to describe their systems.
Cardenas speaks to his day-to-day on-highway testing of the Plus systems, helping refine system capabilities. The interview with Cardenas was conducted by my colleague over at fleet magazine CCJ, Editor Jason Cannon, for CCJ’s weekly video-centric 10-44 series of talks.
Cardenas is no stranger to the owner-operator world, with 11 years of truck ownership in his rearview before he joined up with Plus in his current role in 2018. His long experience begs the question, of course: Why would a career hauler get involved with a company that seems bent on the eventual removal of drivers from the steering wheel, maybe even the seat? It's complicated…
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Oct 25, 2021
Why California ports are overwhelmed: Intermodal perspective from out East
Consider today's Overdrive Radio edition in the context of Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting on the intermodal niche released a week and a half back, and the system-wide backlogs being experienced all around the container-moving supply chains, particularly evident at the nation’s West Coast ports. The feature was another entry in our "Niche Hauls" series of features on freight segments where owner-ops are in high demand: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15279445/intermodal-haulers-fight-off-a-system-collapse-at-ports
What we didn’t get in that three-part report was a perspective from among the top volume ports on the East Coast – for that, Overdrive Editor Todd Dills reached back to small fleet owner-operator George Berry, working out of the Port of Virginia principally. He’s a uniquely qualified source to voice owner-operators’ views on just where congestion issues at the ports originate. For years now he’s been a voice in a group called…
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Oct 13, 2021
Empowerment, education, innovation: Growing minority-owned-business community, trucking influence
In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, a window on the narratives that emerged from the SHE Trucking Expo, where Overdrive Radio host and editor Todd Dills spent Day One of the conference speaking to attendees and organizers about goals of network-building within and outside of the minority-owned business community. Founded and spearheaded by Chattanooga-based longtime driver/owner-operator/SHE Trucking Facebook group founder Sharae Moore, the expo was not only diverse in terms of the backgrounds of people in attendance and participating. As Adam Wingfield, former owner-operator and current head of the Innovative Logistics Group consultancy, put it, Moore excelled in bring together a "diversity of thought" as well, no doubt.
The bulk of the podcast features an end-of-day discussion with these stakeholders, in addition to Wingfield, and all directly connected to Moore's efforts to build the Expo:
**Professional driver and trainer Shanna Sellers, Charlotte, North Carolina
**Pierre L…
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Oct 8, 2021
Meet the owner-ops of the year -- and hear talent-search finalists' performances
Heading up this Overdrive Radio special edition are the words and guitar of none other than Guy Archer, a professional driver with Airgas who’s on his way to Nashville early next month for the recording session that was the prize for his big win last month in the 2021 Overdrive/Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search.
In this edition of the podcast we give the podcast listeners the pleasure of running through the three Talent Search finalists’ excellent entries into that competition, this year having wrapped up its 8th year in existence. Before that, though, catch a window on a special program -- the gala awards presentation at the Truckload Carriers Association’s Truckload 2021 conference out in Las Vegas last week.
It features introductions to the Company Driver of the Year with Overdrive sister magazine Truckers News, and our own Owner-Operator of the Year. The convention center ballroom setting -- with a festive stage flanked by giant screens -- saw each contender telling parts…
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Oct 1, 2021
Introducing the trucking-focused TNC Radio online network with driver Tom Kyrk
This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features an expansive discussion I had with longtime professional trucker Tom Kyrk about his involvement in the relatively new TNC Radio streaming station, gearing itself to speak directly to drivers -- predominantly but not entirely in trucking, as it were. As Kyrk tells, a sizable portion of the content tries to hit the intersection between pro four-wheeled drivers and all of you, Class 8 owners and drivers: https://tncradio.live/
Kyrk’s gotten involved interviewing guests and contributing in various ways after a decade and a half-plus trucking career, all of it as a company driver. As he tells in the beginning portion of today’s podcast, he spent 14 years with Stevens Transport before in recent years moving over in a team operation to IBI Secured Transport.
Also in the podcast: A bit of a public service announcement from Overdrive and the readership that’s directed to everybody’s four-wheeled friends about sharing the road…
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Sep 24, 2021
The big reveal: From a truck to a home, with owner-op Debbie Desiderato and 'celebrity renovator'
This edition of Overdrive Radio features the voice of an owner-operator you may well recognize – Debbie Desiderato, now principally out of Virginia, and sometimes Long Island, New York. She's had quite a year a half or so, moving to sell her long-running and quite recognizable Kenworth in 2020 in a turn back to hotshot car hauling for a time, before she capitalized on opportunity hauling in support of logging operations around her Virginia base with a used purchase of a 2017 Western Star 4900.
Less than a year after purchasing the rig, she’s now the recipient of a custom interior renovation by "Secret Celebrity Renovation" series star Jason Cameron. That was courtesy of the TransFix digital brokerage company after Desiderato won the TransFix My Rig sweepstakes, part of the company’s efforts to give back during National Truck Driver Appreciation week.
It’s a pretty spectacular upgrade, not only for a feature wall at the back of the sleeper with plenty of "wow" factor in it –…
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Sep 16, 2021
Could the COVID hours waiver be flexibility advocates' chance to further disentangle HOS rigidity?
Trucker Nation Director of Communications Andrea Marks is our guest for this edition of Overdrive Radio. Marks is no stranger to the regulatory process -- or the ins and out of running a small trucking business. She has livestock haulers in her family’s small fleet.
She's sharing here what she sees as a golden opportunity for hours of service flexibility advocates lying in plain view, in the form of the COVID-19 emergency declaration, waiving regs for emergency relief haulers of particular commodities since the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020.
There’s not just opportunity therein, though, but danger, given the September 1 changes to the emergency waiver seem to her to be designed to discourage use of the exemption and give regulators a way to control the narrative around its use. She wonders whether they anticipate a serious challenge to the efficacy of the hours of service rule itself.
Any serious challenge might depend on how many carriers are running under the exem…
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Sep 2, 2021
Trucker Talent Search preview: Sheffield, Scripps, Archer square off September 16
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, hear the musical entries of, and interviews with, the three songwriters who are finalists in this year’s Overdrive Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search. It's something of a preview of the big finale, set for September 16, at 5 p.m. Eastern time, and streaming from OverdriveOnline.com.
Find out just how to tune in live that date and sign up for email reminders just before the broadcast via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/15066153/trucker-talent-search-final-competition-set-for-september-16
In the podcast, we'll hear from trucker Mike Sheffield of Kentucky coal country, from Michigan-based Grassmid driver Rich Scripps, and Dayton, Ohio-based Guy Archer. All are featured in conversation, too, with the great Eric Harley, host of Red Eye Radio, Overdrive's partners in the program, now in its 8th year.
This year's event's proved to be a special one, no doubt, with these excellent songwriters with incredibly dive…
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Aug 30, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 9: 'Eastbound and down,' by Jerry Reed
Arguably the best-known and most-loved trucker movie is “Smokey and the Bandit,” and sharing that limelight is its signature song by Jerry Reed, “Eastbound and down.”
The movie, released in 1977, came near the end of trucking’s pop-culture craze of the 1970s. It shared kinship with another movie about trucker rebellion: “Convoy.” That film was released in 1978, though the hit song of the same name that it was based on was released three years earlier.
“Convoy,” even with its comedic moments, was more focused than “Bandit” on the forces that clashed with trucking, said Todd Uhlman, a socio-cultural expert at the University of Dayton. In “Truck Driver’s Blues,” a long piece he published last year in the journal Automotive History Review, Uhlman traced trucking culture through the lens of trucker songs of the last century.
“Bandit,” and to a lesser extent the lyrics of “Eastbound and down,” is about “the trucker engaging in illegal activity, escapi…
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Aug 27, 2021
Five owner-operators, five forecasts for business growth, maintenance, alt-powertrain adoption
At the 2021 Shell Rotella SuperRigs truck show in the Chicago area last month, Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole asked these five owners variations on a couple of central questions:
1. The first asked owners to look out into the future and forecast prospects and plans five years ahead, given the current market and business plans in place.
2. The other had all to do with technology –- alternative powertrains like the electric-drive trucks we’re seeing trickle into the short-haul market, natural-gas power elsewhere, and those increasingly automated driver-assist features that continue to proliferate.
The responses vary and overlap in significant ways -- illuminating in terms of where small trucking is today – and where it might well one day end up, hopefully with bedrock profitability intact.
The owners who participated, clockwise from the top left in the thumbnail image associated with the podcast:
Gary Jones: Owner, SPB Trucking
Clayton Driskill: Owner, C&C Logistics
J.R. Schl…
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Aug 20, 2021
Inside the 20% rule: Out of service brake adjustment, other violations -- and how to prevent
Looking at the landscape for commercial truck inspections, Pennsylvania-based former local-department officer and long-certified DOT inspector Andy Blair sees plenty missed opportunities when it comes to troopers helping truckers when it comes to knowledge of out-of-service violations. All too frequently, violations that put an owner-op or other driver out of service simply aren't explained at the point of inspection. Too many trucking companies large and small, furthermore, he knows, don't invest in the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance out-of-service criteria handbook, the only place you'll find those criteria in all their minutiae.
The equipment category that takes up the largest number of pages therein? Why, brakes, of course. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, Blair runs us through the specifics of the "20% rule" when it comes to clamp-type brake adjustment, among the most common of brake violations. Fundamentally, as he outlined in a document that's excerpted in the post th…
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Aug 13, 2021
Owner-ops' big role out West as AB 5 wound toward this week's Supreme Court filing
The thumbnail image with today's podcast was the product of the 2019 groundswell of grassroots advocacy that rose leading into the ultimate passage of the AB 5 law in California, which codified a controversial court decision that applied the ABC contractor test in the state. That test, to say the least, is problematic for owner-operator lease arrangements with motor carriers as they've traditionally been drawn up -- and federally recognized now for decades in the Truth in Leasing regulations.
In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, we’re going to drop into the annual Symposium event hosted by Overdrive sister fleet publication CCJ. This past Wednesday in Birmingham, Alabama, at the event, CTA CEO Shawn Yadon described what he saw with his own eyes on the ground in 2019 as that groundswell of advocacy rose. The result of that advocacy – a myriad of carveouts in the law by the legislature aimed at a laundry list of professions, but not for trucking, not for owner-operators.
That…
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Aug 9, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 8: 'Little Pink Mack,' by Kay Adams
It’s been decades since the influx of women into truck driving was considered news, at least among trucking media. But look long enough in the rear-view and you’ll reach a time when it was truly a novelty.
One of the first – if not the very first – entertainers to use music to highlight that change was Kay Adams, with “Little Pink Mack.” Released in 1966, the song was written by Chris Roberts, Jim Thornton and Scott Turner.
It wasn’t a strident feminist statement bucking the establishment in the way that, say, “Convoy” traded in themes of rebellion. But it did blend, in a light-hearted way, the singer’s femininity with her absolute confidence in handling a truck as well as any man could, said Todd Uhlman, a specialist in American socio-cultural history at the University of Dayton in Ohio and our guest for this "Songs of the Highway" edition of Overdrive Radio.
“It was the first song that really talked about women truckers. It really framed them as both feminine…
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Aug 6, 2021
Tony Justice and '18 Gears to Life' -- the trucking behind, inside the music
For longtime Overdrive Radio listeners he will need no introduction whatsoever, but for the rest of you, the artist you'll hear straight away in this edition of the podcast is none other than Tony Justice. The Everhart Transportation driver, singer, songwriter and performer's recent history reaches back more than a decade now to the date of his first solo trucking-themed record, called "On the Road." This year, he’s out with his fifth, "18 Gears to Life."
While Justice was in Nashville recently for a video shoot for the "War Paint" single from the record, he sat down Overdrive for a freewheeling talk through a variety of tracks on the record, his first in four years. The studio work on it was interrupted by the COVID pandemic last year. The year before that, as you’ll hear, Justice’s wife, Misty, waged a war against breast cancer that has likewise taken a toll on the music efforts.
At once, the emotion of the experience has inspired the pair forward in several ways.
The new re…
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Jul 30, 2021
SuperRigs show report -- and this small fleet owner's growth story, managing pains that come with it
Just more than a decade ago, owner-operator Don Wood was prepping a recently purchased 2003 Peterbilt 379 former fleet sleeper truck as a custom daycab. He was about to go hauling local hoping to meet his then-young children's home needs after years over the road. That wouldn't last more than a couple years itself before, though, Wood was back out on his own and, as customers leaned on him for their transport needs and drivers he knew needed work, he began to buy other trucks.
He knew he had the customers to keep them going, that's sure. Over the next decade or so, DSD would grow to more than 30 trucks, some owned and some leased and owner-operated. How has he kept up with the demands of growth? Part of it has to do with the nature of the freight -- including a lot of direct customers and particular jobsite contract work that doesn't require constant negotiating with brokers.
Another part: Wood recognizes the true value of what little support staff he and DSD drivers and leased owner…
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Jul 27, 2021
What came before the CDL? 18 years old and hauling interstate in 1917
The context for the conversation you'll hear in today's 60th-anniversary special edition of Overdrive Radio, conducted at the Great American Trucking Show in 2019, was twofold, centered around both driver training and history.
Over the course of the 20th century, as you'll hear, the licensing required for a driver to operate interstate tightened. In the early days of motorized transport, an 18-year-old had no problem being licensed for interstate operation of what passed for the big trucks of the day.
They weren't, of course, very big at all by today's standards. The picture here is one of of Walter Thompson of Shelburn, Indiana, grandfather of Jay Thompson, now an independent consultant to various trucking and natural gas interests through his Transportation Business Associates company.
As I wrote at the time of this conversation's original airing two years ago, Thompson’s been quite a resource for me when it comes to owner-operator and trucking history in general. He grew up in…
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Jul 23, 2021
Insurance, big-ticket maintenance, time off to recharge... What's your biggest business challenge?
Answers to that question in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast from the four owners pictured here. The lightning round comes by way of truckers showing their equipment in the Walcott Truckers Jamboree's Super Truck Beauty Contest two weeks ago: Owner-operator Christopher Young, a one-truck livestock hauler several years into trucking with his own authority out of Shellsburg, Iowa. The veteran, Ashville, Alabama-based team of Michael and Jackie Wallace, hauling van freight yet working through some of the same challenges as the much younger livestock hauler.
We talk to Hallahan Transport small fleet owner Rob Hallahan, who's concerned about the prospects of regulatory change (the insurance hike being currently considered). He's also dealing with the difficulties that come with growth.
Finally: Minnesota-based Aaron Walters, A heavy-hauling owner-op who is second-generation in the family business. For him, growth limitations are top of mind -- if the business could just find mo…
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Jul 16, 2021
'Routine, day's end, on the way home': Getting there, even with advanced assist tech
The principal conundrum of advanced driver assist systems like collision mitigation, lane-keeping and more was summed up well by Nussbaum Transportation driver Clark Reed as part of the panel featured in this edition of Overdrive Radio: "The more we take the driver away from the driving experience ... [the greater the potential] they're going to become lackadaisical. ..." Put another way, we're talking about, in a word, "complacency" -– the strong temptation to let the equipment take the responsibility for the work of safe operation from the hands of those to whom it truly belongs.
That’s the operator, of course, and Reed would go on to say much more than that in the talk with longtime independent owner-operator Henry Albert, a former Overdrive Trucker of the Year, in a panel moderated by TCA chairman and D.M. Bowman chief Jim Ward.
In today’s podcast, that discussion is featured in more depth than we've covered at OverdriveOnline.com as yet: https://www.overdriveonline.com/bus…
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Jul 12, 2021
Real success leased to a 'virtual' carrier: Owner-operator Jason Hurley and CloudTrucks
Wisconsin-based owner-operator Jason Hurley, a former Schneider- leased owner-operator, made a move earlier this year to the young operation of CloudTrucks. The Texas-based company, with some operations in California, pitches to owner-operators as a "virtual carrier," operating less like a traditional asset-based carrier and more like a support company, basically. Cloud puts emphasis on its technology and systems in place to support otherwise independent businesses.
Yet they're no broker or dispatch service -- it's CloudTrucks’ motor carrier authority under which an owner leased there runs.
And though its model generally is tech-assisted self-dispatch for how owner-operators run there, it does field a functional support staff on the back end to smooth out the rough edges of any carrier-broker transaction. The brokered freight market comprises the large majority of its freight universe. Since founding within the last years, they’ve grown quickly. They were up to more than 70 owner…
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Jul 4, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No 7: 'Hello, I'm a truck,' by Red Simpson
Trucking’s music history has no shortage of light-hearted songs, such as Kay Adams’ “Little Pink Mack,” Charlie Walker’s “Truck Drivin’ Cat With Nine Wives” or The Legendary Shack Shakers’ “The CB Song.”
One of the most humorous, thanks to its sharp barbs aimed at truckers, is Joe Cecil “Red” Simpson’s “Hello, I’m a truck.” It hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in January 1972, making it the biggest hit single in Simpson’s long music career.
“This song takes a different angle on the trucking experience,” says Todd Uhlman in this specia Songs of the Highway edition of Overdrive Radio. Uhlman's a specialist in American culture at the University of Dayton in Ohio. “It’s not about the trucker. It’s about the truck.”
At the same time, the truck isn’t shy about criticizing truckers. The truck-narrator notes how drivers love to share “tales of daring” and “the girls they've left behind.”
The truck criticizes its o…
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Jun 30, 2021
Deckplate diner diaries: The ins and outs of this leased owner-operator's in-cab kitchen
"The freedom to eat what I want, when I want, and how I want to make it." --Decker Truck Line-leased owner-operator Thomas Remington, on outfitting his 2020 Volvo VNL740 (auto transmission, mid-roof, spec'd for Decker's flatbed operation) for versatility in cooking on the road.
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, a window on Remington's leased business as well as tips on inverter power electric cooking appliances, propane-powered tools for cooking on the deck, and so much more.
Also in this edition, on a bittersweet day for Overdrive staff as longtime editor Max Heine officially retires as of the first of July, a special message from host Todd Dills going out to Heine, fundamentally an editor with guts, with integrity, and a real sense of care when it comes to telling the story straight, whatever it is.
We'll do our best, Max, to keep it pro out here.
For the video with Remington mentioned in the podcast, follow this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/arti…
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Jun 21, 2021
Little-known movie showcased Overdrive founder’s Hollywood, Nashville forays
Go way back in Overdrive’s 60-year history and you’ll find more than a little dabbling in the bright lights of Hollywood and the country music scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s. It didn’t hurt that the Overdrive office was in the entertainment mecca of the Los Angeles area, but what really drove the connections was Overdrive’s founder and editor, former independent trucker Mike Parkhurst.
Many of those associated with the magazine’s early years have passed on, including Parkhurst, who died in 2014. One of the key players during about half of Parkhurst’s 25-year ownership of Overdrive was Roger Galloway. Now 77, Galloway is communications director for Mohave County, Arizona.
“My Overdrive days were from 1970-'86, with the exception of 1979-'81, when I produced national TV specials,” said Galloway. Some of them focused on country music stars, such as “Great Ladies of Country” and “Tribute to Kitty Wells.” They were not tied to Overdrive, though Galloway’s first T…
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Jun 18, 2021
Diesel emissions maintenance: Getting the right diagnosis, and repair, the first shop visit
There's good likelihood you know how the story goes. Code says a sensor is malfunctioning? Replace the sensor. Two weeks or two days later, same code, same sensor. Previous shop must have passed a bad part or otherwise messed up the install. Replace again, and "hey why don't we try" X or Y until, some weeks later, as happened in the story of owner-operator John Osinga, visual inspection reveals a mechanical issue. Turns out what seemed like a sensor malfunction wasn't really that at all: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15064088/detecting-the-diesel-exhaust-aftertreatment-demons
Hundreds or thousands of dollars later, eureka moments like these are cold comfort, and owner-operators who've experienced these problems always look back and wonder what they could have done differently to spur enterprising (or not so enterprising) mechanics toward an accurate diagnosis and repair, the first time around. There's a lot to be said for picking your maintenance partners wis…
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Jun 14, 2021
Tales of three runaway trucks: Crises endured and averted, lessons learned
Today, this special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, part of our 60th-anniversary series, in part transports you back to a moment in time in the late 1970s, when owner-operator Gordon Alkire found himself in an old Astro 95 cabover with no brakes heading Southeast down the backside of Monteagle Mountain in Tennessee. It’s a situation that’s no exactly universal among truckers through the years, but not as uncommon as you might think. The occasion in 2019 when this part of my talk with Alkire originally ran was the fiery Lakewood, Colorado, crash of Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, who lost control of his truck on a downhill grade and, ultimately, crashed, killing multiple people and sending multiple others to the hospital.
In the wake of the tragedy for all involved, including the driver, charged with vehicular homicide among other counts, the recriminations were quick in coming for him from fellow truckers, with no small amount of finger-pointing to this or that cause.
Alki…
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Jun 11, 2021
Truck parking, under-21 interstate drivers, more: A window on congressional trucking machinations
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, track through Truckload Carriers Association Government Affairs Vice President David Heller’s viewpoints on a variety of aspects of just what’s happening on Capitol Hill around funding infrastructure, including several of those trucking-business-specific initiatives tucked into the House highway bill Overdrive has reported on recently: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15065998/house-highway-funding-bill-keeps-2-million-insurance-hike
Heller spoke at the TCA Safety & Security Division annual meeting earlier in the week in a talk hosted by trucking broadcasting great Dave Nemo and fellow host Jimmy Mac. Along the way, Heller dove into the subject of driver training and the notion of allowing under-21 interstate drivers with extra training, one he and much of Overdrive's audience are well at odds on.
The Drive Safe Act, introduced earlier this year, would establish an apprenticeship-type training program that, with assi…
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Jun 6, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 6: 'Convoy,' by C.W. McCall
Trucking’s rise in pop culture was well underway when “Convoy” was released in late 1975, capturing the hearts of not just truckers but many Americans.
The song, heavily laden with CB slang and conversation, tells the story of a spontaneous truck convoy that clashes with authorities. It was by C.W. McCall, who was actually a character co-created and voiced by advertising executive Bill Fries.
“It hit at a conjuncture of a lot of different things,” said Todd Uhlman, assistant professor of U.S. socio-cultural history of the University of Dayton. “First of all, the trucker movie had really begun to take off.” “Duel” had come out in 1971 and “White Line Fever” debuted in 1975. “Simultaneously, the CB had really begun to expand outside of the trucker circle and become a kind of pop culture phenomenon.”
The song led to the movie “Convoy,” released in June 1978. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, it starred Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw and Ernest Borgnine.
That m…
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Jun 4, 2021
Inside the divide between docs and Congress, trucking constituencies over sleep apnea
Also in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast: Intro'ing a new dispatch provider in S2 Logistics, with hotshot hauler S2 Transport co-owner Scott Sabatini at its helm and stressing integrity in operations, a response to his own early difficulties.
When the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Medical Review Board met May 20 in part to take up a revised sleep-apnea-related section of the FMCSA’s official handbook for the fine folks that perform DOT physicals all around the country, doctors on the board discovered that handbook drafters had made pains in that section to remove a detailed set of screening, testing and treatment recommendations. The Medical Review Board had originally come up with those in 2016, when FMCSA was considering pursuing rulemaking around the condition. Those recommendations were then in a draft update to the official medical examiners’ handbook that came to light about a year ago but had yet to be officially published as the agency worked o…
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May 28, 2021
As the pandemic eases, owner-ops take stock of parking, biz pressures, more
... and plenty more. At the East Coast Truckers Jamboree truck show early this month, Overdrive news editor Matt Cole spoke with these six owner-operators about a lot more than just the custom rigs they were showing (speaking of which, keep tuned to http://overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs for views on/videos of all mentioned here through the next weeks).
A year following the depths of the early-pandemic downturn, it felt like a fine time to reflect on the experience of the past year. Here find perspectives on the trials, and some joys, of trucking through the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as thoughts on where truckers go from here in terms of addressing the biggest issues of the present well into the future, chief among them the parking situation all around the country.
Featured owner-operators here are:
**Robert Davis, out of Vermont, hauling Cabot Cheese in a 2012 Great Dane 53-foot slide and spread reefer, with a 1988 Freight FLC120.
**Austin Kiser drives for his dad’s operation, Gr…
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May 21, 2021
The trucking spirit within 'Cumberland Bones,' the new record from Stephen Flatt
This week's special edition of Overdrive Radio features the words and music of singer-songwriter Stephen Flatt, native of White County, Tennessee, and current Nashville resident. Flatt's first record as a solo artist, "Cumberland Bones," came out last month and features the "Hold You Tonight" single that in part takes the point of view of a long-distance hauler on his way home to the family.
As you might well have guessed, Flatt’s no stranger to trucking, having worked for years in shipping and receiving and thus with plenty trucking companies, owner-ops and drivers, for a few different outfits. Today he’s doing logistics work in the health-care space, dealing with smaller packages but with similar concerns.
If Stephen Flatt’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s got bluegrass royalty a few generations behind him – one Lester Flatt, in fact, was his Great Uncle. I had the chance earlier this week to sit down with him for a half-hour to run through some of the tracks…
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May 17, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 5: 'Six Days on the Road,' by Dave Dudley
Where does the loveable-outlaw image of the professional trucker first come into play in a big way in American culture? Perhaps the earliest notable instance came with Dave Dudley’s hit, “Six Days on the Road.” American culture expert Todd Uhlman makes that association in this ongoing "Overdrive’s Songs of the Highway" series, part of Overdrive's ongoing 60th anniversary celebration with coverage of trucking history: http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history
“Six Days” remains in contemporary times one of trucking’s most popular songs -- a decade ago around Overdrive's 50th anniversary, readers voted the track as the No. 1 trucking song of all time: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14875984/results-the-top-10-trucking-songs-of-all-time
It was initially record by Paul Davis and released in 1961, but it was Dudley who put it on the map with his version in 1963. It reached number two on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and crossed over at No. 32 on…
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May 14, 2021
'What extortion looks like': Owner-operator Glenn Keller v. Parking Pirates, round 2
In late 2019 going into 2020 the state of Colorado became what's believed to be the first to ban statewide the practice of booting an occupied vehicle, just what you’re about to hear in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, with audio courtesy of the 911 call April 21 from Louisiana-based owner-operator Glenn Keller to dispatch in Gaston County, North Carolina, due west of Charlotte. Regular Overdrive readers may well be familiar with Keller from past coverage of his leased operation, some of it towing- and Gastonia-related, interestingly enough.
That's where Keller was when this happened, idling while sitting in the driver's seat in a place where there is no express prohibition on the onerous occupied-vehicle-booting practice. Keller was surrounded by three tow trucks, whose operators who demanded money, and Keller promptly involved the police when he realized there was no escape.
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we talk further with Keller about just what happened here,…
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May 5, 2021
Rising oil prices -- for dry bulk hauler Sisu Energy, there's far less fear than opportunity
The fears among many in the diesel-powered owner-operator community of late are real when it comes to rising oil prices with constraints on production and promotion of alternative sources of energy, as we've reported. All of it seems to mean little more than added costs for those fearful, but for the man whose voice is featured in this edition of Overdrive Radio, it all feels less like a problem than an opportunity.
That’s Jim Grundy, headquartered in Texas and owner of Sisu Energy LLC, an all-owner-operator/leased-small-fleet carrier hauling mostly dry bulk in the oil and gas business. Grundy's got a multifaceted trucking background, which includes past work with the 1845 company, likewise heavy in oil and gas-related hauling.
Farther back, as you’ll hear, he came up in the trucking world in more over the road operations, and when COVID hit last year he put that experience to work to take advantage of OTR opportunities in a new division of the company that’s power-only for owne…
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Apr 26, 2021
The first Mother's Day Make-a-Wish convoy in Pennsylvania, remembered with George Ruelens
This special edition of Overdrive Radio is part of our weekly 60th-anniversary series of stories with a significant historical aspect, as it's got no doubt in spades. It features the voice of former trucker George Ruelens, telling his tale in a 2019 interview about what’s become a veritable institution out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania -- the annual Mother’s Day truck convoy benefiting the Make-a-Wish foundation. In 2019, the convoy featured 650 trucks in its 30th year, a huge amount of growth over the course of three decades from the first one, which Ruelens well-remembers.
With last year’s event sidelined amid the initial COVID outbreak, the 2021 event on May 9 upcoming should be every bit as impressive: https://secure2.wish.org/site/TR;jsessionid=00000000.app208a?fr_id=3758&pg=entry
Find more pictures from Ruelens' archive from the first even in the late 1980s via http://overdriveonline.com/14896399
Read more of our weekly 60th-anniversary series of dispatches from truc…
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Apr 23, 2021
CSA's Achilles' Heel: The pubic nature of carrier data
From the advent of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s CSA Safety Measurement System in 2010, its shortcomings were well-evident to carriers and baked into its structure. At that time, carriers were laser-focused on equities in scoring, particularly when comparing the way a small carrier's scores moved wildly with very little data input versus the slow climbs and falls with more data on the large-carrier side. As the years have gone by there's been refinement of a sense among critics of the program that the very public nature of the data underpinning what passes for CSA today is its fatal design flaw, with far too many "unintended consequences," in the words of Payne Trucking Safety Director Chris Haney, that have been at best unfair to carriers forced to contend with them on a daily basis.
That’s inclusive of small fleets and owner-operators, and company drivers to an extent, too, given the increased importance of every violation you could possibly think of, large a…
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Apr 19, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 4: 'Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel,' by Red Sovine
He’s best-known for his trucking hits “Giddyup Go,” “Teddy Bear” and “Phantom 309.” But another single by Red Sovine, a master of the sentimental trucker song, spoke poignantly to the difficult family dynamic of over-the-road haulers and their kin back home.
That’s “Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel.” It’s a tribute to truckers’ wives, as the lyrics say, a "special breed of woman" that has to "share a love affair with that long stretch of highway on his mind."
The theme, however, is more complex, considering the realities of over-the-road drivers being separated from their wives so much, said Todd Uhlman, a professor at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, who specializes in America’s socio-cultural history. In this episode of the "Songs of the Highway" special feature to Overdrive Radio as Overdrive celebrates 60 years as the Voice of the American Trucker, hear how the lyrics perpetuate the romantic notion of a long-suffering wife waiting for the return o…
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Apr 16, 2021
Building a small fleet as destination for the best: Alabama-based Brian Lindley's LB3
You probably think you know Wedowee, Alabama-based Brian Lindley. Not afraid to work, grew up on a farm, grew up 'round trucks – all are familiar aspects of many a story in the trucking business. But as with so many of the millions of stories out there, there’s plenty of twists and turns in the details when it comes to the tale Lindley has for you in today's edition of Overdrive Radio.
Having started out hauling chicken litter from poultry operations with this Mack daycab -- which had a trash body to begin with as part of one of Lindley's early-career efforts doing storm recovery and tree work -- Lindley is the owner of the now-20-truck LB3. He's got three owner-operators leased on, and the balance of the power units are operated in full-service lease arrangements with Penske. He's hauling mostly for direct customers.
In just under a decade, he's turned what was a very small operation into what he hopes is a "destination company," of a fashion, for the best in the business. He's…
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Apr 9, 2021
Owner-ops are not company drivers for a reason -- ABC test in practice, more data from ATBS
Today’s special edition of the podcast is a re-air of ATBS President Todd Amen’s semi-annual conference call with clients of the business services firm and other owner-operators that offers the opportunity for listeners to benchmark their own income performance against the averages of their peers that ATBS computes. Near the call’s beginning, though, Amen detailed the pressures that the Biden administration and Congress have renewed against the independent contractor model writ large. Fleets of all sizes are worrying more about it, as he shows, and some owner-operators are, too.
At once, the majority of ATBS’ owner-op clientele aren’t aware even of California’s A.B. 5 law, for instance, in place now for a year and a half and currently not applying to trucking, though that could change depending on pending court cases. The so-called ‘ABC test’ in that law in essence prevents an independent contractor relationship between a worker and a business if both parties are essen…
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Apr 2, 2021
Flailing toward an 'automated future'? Over the Road reality, more in final episode
The Over the Road podcast, a co-production of Overdrive and PRX’s Radiotopia podcast network, finished its run of eight main episodes last year with this final episode, titled “The Road Ahead,” in which Overdrive contributing writer and Moeller Trucking driver Paul Marhoefer documented a yogurt haul outbound from the Midwest to Texas and then to the 2019 Great American Trucking Show in Dallas, Texas. There, the OTR crew explored the implications for drivers of new technology in trucking — specifically, the march toward vehicles capable of more autonomous operation.
Automation has become a fundamental piece of the way so many think about the future of trucks and trucking, including regulators who seem bent on preparing the way in the name of safety. regular listeners may recall news that aired just a couple weeks ago here in which the new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator expressed her view that, though the timeline is ultimately unknown, that “automated future,” a…
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Mar 29, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 3: 'I've Been Everywhere'
Johnny Cash isn’t the only singer who’s taken on the challenge of sprinting through the long, rhyming lists of cities in “I’ve Been Everywhere.” As some older readers might recall, the song was a big hit in 1962 for Hank Snow. Its success helped vault trucking songs further into the mainstream of an expanding country music radio scene, says Todd Uhlman, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio who’s specialized in socio-cultural history, in this special edition of Overdrive Radio attendant to Overdrive's ongoing celebration of it's 60th anniversary year in 2021.
Country music and trucking songs were firmly established by 1966, when Johnny Cash did a version that’s perhaps the best-known, at least in the U.S. There were other covers, too, including one by Lynn Anderson in 1970. Yet "I've Been Everywhere" has roots farther back, and way farther afield, that trace all the way to the Land Down Under. Hear its history here in this latest "Songs of the Highwa…
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Mar 26, 2021
Roadcheck preps, with the state where inspections were up in 2020, not down like everywhere else
In the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020, there were but two states in the entire nation where truck inspections numbers in the aggregate rose from 2019 levels. Every other state saw fall-offs ranging from just a few percentage points to more than a third in some places. Alabama's mostly mobile enforcement crew posted higher number, in part a result the state's investment in an expansion of the department. In this episode of Overdrive Radio, Captain Brent McElvaine of Alabama explains further reasons -- a continued emphasis on inspection screening via "virtual weigh stations" with weigh-in-motion or other technologies to better prioritize inspections of trucks and carriers troopers believe probably need it, for instance.
There's more where that came from, however, in this episode, including a bevy of tips for owner-ops looking ahead to the May 4-6 Roadcheck event -- in one of Roadcheck's prinicipal areas of emphasis this year, lighting equipment, Alabama ranks very high. Nearly 1 in 4 of…
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Mar 19, 2021
Indelible trucking portrait -- Long Haul Paul's 'Long Haul of Fame' through highs, lows of history
Another edition here drops in Overdrive Radio's re-air of the Over the Road podcast series, coproduced by Overdrive and PRX's Radiotopia podcast network and hosted by 'Long Haul Paul' Marhoefer. Here, the host's "Long Haul of Fame” tells the stories of five of Marhoefer’s personal heroes -- longtime professional driver Idella Marie Hansen; owner-operator Big Jim Selkirk; trucker Ken “Shoestring” Waugh; overnight radio D.J. Marcia Campbell; and, finally, a tribute to one of those heroes who’s passed on, New York-based Fast Freddie Lieb, the “Pope of Pompano” running out of the Florida Pompano Beach market and up and down the East Coast, where Marhoefer knew him best.
What emerges over the course of the episode is an indelible take on recent trucking history through these individual stories, including that of Marhoefer himself.
Also in the podcast: Highlights from the week's news, which you can keep tabs on daily via Overdrive's daily newsletter. Subscribe via http://over…
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Mar 12, 2021
Trucking team turns to rocking country with new record, 'If Wishes Were Horses'
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, we hear selections from the new 'If Wishes Were Horses' long player out from Rylan Brooks, the songwriting duo of Chris Brooks (Philadelphia) and Nate Rylan (Nashville). Brooks is a former independent owner-operator trucking with authority and now one half of this songwriting duo truly doing great work here with their second record, a follow-up to 2018's 'Half Wild.' Rylan and Brooks’ history as a band -- with a particularly hard-driving brand of what you might call 'outlaw country' (or would in another time) ... the collaboration blossomed on the road when Rylan came aboard with Brooks’ business as a codriver on longer, time-sensitive runs. Here, along with updates for the week in the trucking news, follow along through the pair's narration of how the record came to be and the influence of the road in their writing through and through.
Find more about the band at its website: https://rylanbrooks.com/
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Mar 5, 2021
'Our Punjabi brothers' -- portrait of a protest, a trucking community, and changed hearts and minds
In this week's Overdrive Radio podcast episode, we drop into October of 2017, a key moment in trucking regulatory history over the last several years, given demonstrations on both coasts and some points in between against the electronic logging device mandate. Generally, out east, those demonstrations were comparatively small, but you can tie a direct line between them and the next year’s pursuit by FMCSA of hours of service changes designed to enhance drivers’ scheduling options around the clarion call for rest-period flexibility that emerged in the aftermath.
Where those 2017 demonstrations were in fact not small, however, was out west, led by a coalition of Punjabi-American owner-operators, drivers and advocates. We told that story in brief in Overdrive at the time, and then again via the person of one Binda Atwal this past year in Episode 6 of the Over the Road podcast, produced in collaboration with PRX's Radiotopia. This edition of Overdrive Radio looks back at the tale, whi…
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Mar 1, 2021
Songs of the Highway, No. 2: 'Truck Driver's Blues,' by the Texas Wanderers
Chart-topping songs about trucking have been around for decades. But what was the first one to become a big hit? It was “Truck Driver’s Blues,” performed by the Texas Wanderers and sung by piano player Moon Mullican and at other times by Cliff Bruner, said Todd Uhlman. Uhlman's an assistant professor who’s specialized in U.S. socio-cultural history and has published a lengthy article about trucking music’s place in that history. The song was written by Louisianan Ted Daffan after he visited honky-tonks frequented by truckers. “Truck Driver’s Blues” was one of 1939’s biggest hits, Uhlman says in this special edition of Overdrive Radio attendant to Overdrive's coverage of trucking history in this its 60th-anniversary year.
Find more history coverage, including part 1 in the "Songs of the Highway" special series, via http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history
Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: http://overdriveonline.com
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Feb 26, 2021
The long tail of the CB's social utility, or: How the Lucky Turkey became the Maverick became ...
Owner-operator Mike Crawford in this week's Overdrive Radio expands on some of the themes showcased earlier this week in our special-edition podcast in part about the ongoing safety utility, and the decreased cultural importance, of the CB in trucking.
If you missed that 60th-anniversary podcast earlier this week and attendant coverage, visit http://OverdriveOnline.com/trucking-history access it.
We wanted to bring Crawford back in here because what you heard for him via that special edition was just a very sliver of our longer conversation – the talk was centered on the CB and his history, how he went from being the Lucky Turkey to the Maverick for a time to what he's known pretty much universally as today. Listen on ...
Crawford's an independent with his authority now for many years but running mostly with a single broker – Prime’s logistics group, after having leased there for many years. He was Trucker of the Year back in 2010 in the Overdrive program of that time.
Read mo…
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Feb 22, 2021
60th-anniversary special: CB radio's safety, cultural importance, past to present
This special edition Overdrive Radio is part of our celebration 60 years since the magazine's founding in 1961 -- as such, every Monday we’re looking back on various elements of the trucking business and culture as they’ve existed in the past and evolved on up through today via http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history
For this episode, we’re looking at the CB radio, both in the context of safety and trucking culture. First, we run back through the first in my Channel One Nine series of mini-episodes produced in collaboration with PRX’s Radiotopia last year – that episode was devoted to CB handles and the history of the CB in trucking in brief.
Following that is a variety of reader views from 2017, after a disastrous late-night winter pileup on I-80 in Pennsylvania, around the importance of using the CB in dangerous conditions to avoid such events -– this time of year, as is particularly in evidence this year, such sentiment is, as they say, timeless.
Hear more from th…
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Feb 19, 2021
DataQs for violations, crashes: Minn.'s appeals process, reform efforts, and how to work the system
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, we’ll hear from Captain Jon Olsen of Minnesota State Patrol's truck enforcement unit, one of many sources for Overdrive's reporting about the federal DataQs system that went live earlier this week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15063803/criticism-of-dataqs-review-system-continues-to-rise
Overdrive Editorial Director Max Heine and Senior Editor Todd Dills dug into the FMCSA's data around the DataQs system, doing scads of interviews over the last several months as well, and Olsen's state of Minnesota was one of two states that emerged as a model for a potential national reform effort in early stages as we speak.
When a DataQs challenge cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of the carrier, Minnesota offers the chance for an appeal to a review panel that includes not only supervisory staff from the State Patrol itself but also outside representatives from industry, introducing a measure of fairness that has been uncommon fo…
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Feb 12, 2021
COVID hours exemption not valid 'just because you're hauling food'; OTR's 'Back home'
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, another in the run through our eight-episode Over the Road podcast series, coproduced for 2020 with PRX's Radiotopia podcast network. "Back home" featured our own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer, host of the show, and Over the Road contributing producer Lacy Roberts on a haul back through Lacy’s childhood as a daughter of a trucking family growing up in Montana. The tale, among the most-listened-to within the trucking community (the podcast was broadcast out to a general listening audience as well), offered a moving portrait of the sacrifices over-the-road drivers make balancing work and family life -- and the sacrifices, too, those back home endure.
Before we get there, though, Captain Jon Olsen of the Minnesota State Patrol offers some food for thought on the COVID-19 emergency declaration's exemption to the hours of service, still in place at least through the end of the month. He and colleagues note there seems to be a disconnect between those alo…
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Feb 5, 2021
The best nanner pudding on I-75 -- and the custom restoration of this 1980 Kenworth W900A
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, take a tour down I-75 in Kentucky in search of an answer to the age-old question: Who has the best nanner pudding among the truck stops along that route, and which one of them was the first to advertise it on the CB?
This week, we run back through some trucking micro-history with our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer via another edition in the Over the Road podcast series, originally produced by PRX’s Radiotopia in collaboration with us here at Overdrive. It’s a veritable caper of a episode, so hang on tight.
Also in the podcast: A fairly moderate amount of snow in and around Evanston, Wyoming, this season has put a bit of a damper on business for the Dustbusters provider of road de-icers and stabilizers for dusty gravel roads. It hasn't, however, stopped work in the shop on a beauty of a daycab 1980 Kenworth W900A owner-operator Martin Herman has put in with this crew -- Dustbusters owner Craig Prete, shop foreman Cole Potter, mechanic Kipp Knigh…
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Jan 29, 2021
Fuel's up, rates down, and this owner-op's growth determination in authority's 'honeymoon'
In April 2019. Kenyette Godhigh-Bell was a company driver at Grand Island Express. Our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer met her for the first time at the company headquarters in Nebraska when researching and recording for what would become the Over the Road podcast. If you’re a regular Overdrive Radio listener, you heard that episode and met Godhigh-Bell from that time. Part of the episodes featured the sound of a class intended for drivers at the company who were considering the decision to buy a truck themselves.
It was no accident that Kenyette was in that class. About a year to the day later, she took the keys to a 2017 Freightliner Cascadia and leased on with small fleet B-F Trucking out of Plainfield, Ill.. Today, she's in what she calls a bit of a “honeymoon period” with her authority active since the beginning of the year, running short-haul loads from Amazon facility to Amazon facility in and around Atlanta, where she lived as a young woman and attended school -- though h…
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Jan 22, 2021
The OTR 'Brief history of trucking in America' -- and this preserved 1978 Pete 352
For today’s episode of the Overdrive Radio podcast, brace for a long run through the history of trucking with former household-goods-hauling owner-operator Finn Murphy, also a well-versed student of that history. Murphy is interviewed and much of the story is narrated by Overdrive contributing writer and reefer hauler "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. This brief history of trucking in America tracks the rise of the business from the 1920s up through today -– and the owner-operator's central role in it all. It was originally part of the Over the Road podcast series, Overdrive's 2020 coproduction with PRX's Radiotopia
We’ll hear form a past wildcatter about, among other thing, the Allis Chalmers "Purple People Eater" engine in one of his trucks; from Murphy about his post-deregulation career, made possible in part by the 1980 Motor Carrier Act’s removal of barriers to entry that kept many new ventures out of non-agricultural freight markets; and about the rise of the Teamsters in regu…
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Jan 18, 2021
Songs Of The Highway, No. 1: 'Wreck on the Mountain Road,' by the Red Fox Chasers
What was the first recorded trucking song? According to Todd Uhlman, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio, “Wreck on the Mountain Road,” recorded by the Red Fox Chasers in 1928, may well have set the stage for many such songs to come. Such trivia is only a small part of what Uhlman academic specialty has uncovered -- he places trucking songs in the context of U.S. socio-cultural history, explaining how each song reflects something of the trucking industry and culture at the time of its release.
This year, as Overdrive shares pieces of trucking history in weekly installments attendant to our 60th anniversary celebration, we’ll hear more from Uhlman in this new "Songs of the Highway" podcast series of shorts from Overdrive Radio, about a variety of important trucking songs -- some familiar, some not.
The Chasers’ song “tells the real-life story of a trucker named Lonnie Brown who died in an accident on Bent Mountain in Southwest Virginia,” Uhlman wrote…
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Jan 15, 2021
Inside an uptick in human smuggling via truck: Avoid unwitting participation, keep attention high
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Chief Patrol Agent for the Laredo, Texas, sector Matthew Hudak has a message for the trucking community about what he’s seeing in the numbers since October 2020 when it comes to busted human smuggling operations. There's been a dramatic uptick in instances of drivers moving strange cargo in their dry van or reefer trailers -- actual human beings. In some cases, the drivers involved may have been initially hookwinked into participation in the schemes, though the red flags are what they are, and should be easy to spot for anyone recruited by a smuggling ring for the purpose.
For the entirety of fiscal year 2020, ending September 30, Chief Hudak said 1,400 people were caught being smuggled in tractor-trailers. Since October, in just a short three and a half months, 51 separate busts involved more than 1,600 people, a sizable increase in real numbers, in just a fourth of the time.
The image asso…
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Jan 7, 2021
Trucking with authority and other reasons 'Why we drive' -- OTR rewind No. 2
A note for Overdrive Radio subscribers using some podcasting apps: We’ve got a new, redesigned website coming at http://OverdriveOnline.com – if you regularly listen via a podcasting app other than those offered by Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or Apple or Google podcasts, we’re transitioning to a different principle RSS feed for Overdrive Radio. If you need to in your app, you can update the settings with this feed URL and be certain to get all of the episodes going forward: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:63998864/sounds.rss
In today's edition, we’re taking a run back through another episode of the Over the Road podcast series -- hopefully engrossing listening to take you through a long run and perhaps a little diversion from the political rancor of our chaotic time. This is episode 2 in the OTR series -- originally titled “Why We Drive.” Regular readers will know we produced Over the Road in collaboration with PRX’s Radiotopia podcast network, and…
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Dec 31, 2020
Brass tacks, bad brokers, big loads to count down the hours with a long run into 2021
Happy New Year! For this final 2020 edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Daniel and Phyllis Snow are here, as is Rico Muhammad and Joe DeLorenzo and Jim Mullen and all the owner-ops and government administrators and brokers and drivers and others we talked to this year. We’re going to hear from a lot of them as we tour back through this oh-so-chaotic and pivotal of years trucking in America. We’ll be counting down the top 10 podcasts of the year along the way, and hearing from some other editions besides, from chaos of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to the hours of service changes, the Biden election and more.
Find a playlist of 14 shows, including that top 10 and a four-way tie for the 11th spot, in the Channel 19 blog post that houses this podcast: http://overdriveonline.com/channel19
There, you can hear in full any of the editions.
Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: http://overdriveonline.com/newsletter-signup
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Dec 23, 2020
Back to the 'Biggest Tailgate in Trucking' -- and Germann Soeth's 1976 KW K100
With this edition of the podcast, just two days out from Christmas, we’re starting a run back through a little high-quality road listening with Overdrive's podcast coproduction with PRX’s Radiotopia network. The Over the Road podcast ran originally between February and June 2020, and the principal eight-episode series was hosted by our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. Therein, we hoped to give mainstream, general-public listeners an intimate portrait of the wide array of voices and issues emanating out of and hotly debated within the owner-operator community, also with clear portraits of the men and women doing the work of trucking.
And while Over the Road was broadcast for a general listening audience, we did the best we could to accommodate the perspectives and needs of those who, like you, are on the inside of trucking. What emerged was an uncommon sort of end result -– less an explainer of trucking to the outsider than an exploration of the present through stories of the past…
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Dec 18, 2020
Log annotations to avoid hours of service violations, new split sleeper, and more from FMCSA Q&A
Today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast runs through the variety of hours of service issues addressed yesterday in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's third Q&A relative to the changes put in place as of Sept. 29. One particular question addressed a subject we've taken up before -- namely what happens if you need the 14-hour-clock pause value of a berth period to avoid a violation and you're inspected before you can pair that period with another berth period to complete the split.
FMCSA Enforcement Director Joe DeLorenzo noted, and he has also said in the past, that officers are trained to the assumption that a second split will be completed, yet are assumptions enough to go on? You can always verbally make clear to an inspector your intentions to split, yet a contemporaneous annotation of any off-duty period you intend to begin a split pair could further underly those intentions, in my view. If you’re inspected prior to the next qualifying pair, it would give t…
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Dec 11, 2020
OTR soundtrack custom-built for 2020: Paul Marhoefer's 'Songs from a truck'
The 11 tracks on Long Haul Paul Marhoefer's new "Songs from a Truck" album -- available now via the streaming platforms and on a CD you can order via http://longhaulpaulmusic.com/merch -- cap what’s been quite a year for Marhoefer, as most of you will know pretty well. He was the voice of the Overdrive/Radiotopia coproduction of the Over the Road podcast earlier this year, which reached millions of listeners both inside and out of trucking. His stories of hauling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, turned no small number of your ears early on in the national panic that ensued -- and lately, too -- via his contributions to the Overdrive Extra blog, and Overdrive Radio.
For me, though, this record, released with little promotional fanfare a couple months back, might be the crowning achievement. It follows the stellar “You Were a Good Hand” from a year ago, and comes at a time where its explorations of personal history and emotion will strike a chord for anyone struggling w…
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Dec 4, 2020
Is it time to account for independent dispatch services in regulation?
The Transportation Intermediaries Association's August-filed petition is well-known for its request to FMCSA to essentially throw out the transparency reg in place since the early 1980s, and in other forms earlier than that. What's been discussed far less, however, is the second part of the broker group TIA's petition, that having to do with independent dispatchers.
TIA asks the agency to provide formal guidance officially limiting dispatchers to working with just a single carrier and, in cases where they work with multiple carriers, require a broker authority and bond.
For today's edition of Overdrive Radio, hear the voice one such independent dispatch service, the one-woman shop of Brittany Hamstreet's Brittany Dispatch business, headquartered in California, likewise the Brittany Dispatch customer owner-operator Brian Bent, who weighs in on just what it would mean to his business if additional regulatory requirements eventuated in Hamstreet no longer being available to negotiat…
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Nov 27, 2020
Music, tales for the big road: John Malayter, Long Haul Paul, and bluegrass pro Tina Adair
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, a little music and storytelling to take you through the weekend and into next, whether you're still off for Thanksgiving or on the road:
**A tour through the Nashville session at Jay Vernali's Jay's Place studio on music row with our 2020 Trucker Talent Search winner, John Malayter. Hear the results of that session, as Malayter tells the stories behind four tracks any fan of folk-blues and bluegrass is likely to enjoy. The Jordan Carriers hauler, who lives in Rogersville, Tenn., picked up the guitar at a young age and learned to finger- and flat-pick, bluegrass-style, mostly self-taught, and has made music an integral part of his life for decades since.
**Bluegrass pro Tina Adair talks through the June session that delivered the first single from a forthcoming, as yet untitled record, along with her performing and songwriting history in part with the Grammy-nominated and otherwise award-winning all-female bluegrass group Sister S…
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Nov 20, 2020
What can owner-operators expect from a Biden administration?
For this edition of Overdrive Radio, we sat down with Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association President Todd Spencer and Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh in an attempt to forecast some answers to the question in the title. The conversation touched on potential Congressional and/or administrative initiatives around infrastructure (parking infrastructure being a principal component), interest (or not) things few in trucking want to see like insurance hikes and speed-limiter mandates, the recent and potentially further hours of service changes, the profile of the brokered freight transparency issue, and much more.
Find further editions of Overdrive Radio via our Trucking Business playlist here on SoundCloud or via http://OverdriveOnline.com/OverdriveRadio
Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: overdriveonline.com/newsletter-signup
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Nov 13, 2020
Double-brokered freight fraud: How to prevent, with a U.S. postal inspector who cracked case
Regular Overdrive readers may well recall the case of a William Hickey of Maryland last year -- Hickey was convicted of operating as a U.S. runner for a mostly overseas ring of identity thieves targeting both brokers and carriers in a double-brokering scheme that's sucking hundreds of thousands in freight payments out of trucking. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, U.S. postal inspector Steve Cohen of the federal U.S. Postal Inspection Service offers clarity on how the scheme operates, and just what brokers and carriers can do to put a stop to it. As he well knows, Hickey's capture and conviction was just a blip -- as the scheme is still well in operation as thieves adapt.
Given limitations on extradition in the countries where these rings operate, Cohen and his team, including local and state partners around the nation, are mostly limited themselves to targeting the money launderers operating here. Over the phone lines where the ID thieves ply their trade, though, it's you that c…
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Nov 6, 2020
Where's the size 'sweet spot' for small fleets? And other insights into owner-op growth
Is there an ideal size for an owner-operator as he/she adds trucks, drivers and freight? The answer to that question is probably, well, "it depends." It's certain, though, that whether leased or independent with carrier authority, any owner is bound to reach a point where administrative and/or sales/operational demands outstrip his/her ability to handle everything -- and still haul.
Cadle Trucking owner Ben Cadle is just about at that breaking point, and feels he may have reached his "sweet spot" of sorts at 11 full-time drivers and trucks in operation (12 if you count him and his "Joy Ride 3" cabover, too, though his hauling frequency seems less and less as time goes on). His fleet's size has doubled over the course of the last five years, and "I don't want any more trucks at this point, he said, “It gets to a certain point it’s like, 'Yeah, I’m good.'”
As have so many small fleet operators I’ve talked to through the years, Cadle credits his drivers as the bedrock of his…
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Oct 30, 2020
Listen back: FMCSA's brokered freight transaction transparency session
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s listening session on brokered freight transactions this past Wednesday, October 28, shone light from multiple viewpoints on regulation that today exists and that some feel is being circumvented by brokers to owner-operators', shippers' and the public's detriment. Others -- brokers, principally -- voice the view that the reg has outlived its usefulness and applicability in today's freight market.
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, track back through the entire session, with quite a lot of commentary from the broker side of the equation at the top, but with truckers further weighing in in roughly equivalent numbers as the session wears on.
At issue specifically: three petitions, two to beef up the regulation requiring disclosure of all freight charges on both sides of a brokered transaction, another to remove the reg entirely. 49 Code of Federal Regulations 371.3(c) is the part of the broker regulations at principal issue…
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Oct 23, 2020
Sell service, haul value -- word to the wise of the next generation, from longtime independent
An owner-operator's over-reliance on the path of least resistance to freight will like as not get him/her in trouble in a down market, notes longtime independent Artie Daniel, out of McKinney, Virginia. Not that he doesn't understand the attraction of today's online marketplaces and the speed and convenience they offer for freight. But he's built his business over time and through the years with a mind on serving a customer (whether broker or shipper) toward building a solid connection, with close communication and more. "You've got to build relationships with people who you can trust, to make it work," he said. If you don't have that, "you're at their mercy." Plenty more from Daniel's history and about his 1982 Kenworth W900A, bought a few years ago from an original owner who'd put only scant miles on the unit over decades as his personal truck.
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Oct 16, 2020
The day an ELD mandate protestor and ELD provider visited the White House to talk brokers
The title of this Overdrive Radio podcast sounds a little like the set-up for an inside-baseball joke of sorts, but for owner-operator Mike Landis and Ezlogz head and former owner-op C.J. Karman, that day was a serious one indeed. Directly and indirectly in a variety of ways, its culimination of the three-week Mayday-begun protest vigil outside the White House has had material effects in terms of getting the conversation going around enforcement and potential enhancement of the 49 CFR 371.3 transparency requirement for brokers when other parties in a freight transaction request it.
Here, Landis and Karman nonetheless narrate the story of how the two came to be on the same page in talks over the issue with the White House chief of staff in May 2020.
FMCSA recently extended the comment period on three petitions and the transparency regulation in general through November 18. Find a link to where you can comment at Regulations.gov directly in this recent coverage of the extension: https:…
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Oct 7, 2020
ELDs giving wrong impression to operators about short-split pause value
Answers to several hours of service questions in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, including:
1. Can I use a three-hour nap and not get penalized on it in the 14-hour rule?
2. How do you log a 20-load back and forth load/unload trip where there's scantly a mile between load/unload sites?
3. To use split sleeper, does it matter if the shorter period is longer than three hours? Is the pause value for the duty clock still there?
Also: a peculiarity of some ELDs that makes it seem as if the shorter of the sleeper/off-duty periods hasn't changed much at all when it comes to the ability to pause the 14-hour clock, and one provider's efforts to improve the split experience in their app.
Bonus: Several voices -- and plenty horns -- from 'That's a Big 10-4 on D.C.' on the National Mall October 2 in D.C.
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Sep 25, 2020
Final review: Hours of service changes recap, detailed explanation with FMCSA
Are you ready for September 29? In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we’re diving into the specifics of the hours of service changes going into effect on that date with FMCSA's Joe DeLorenzo, something of a recap from our GATS Week session in late August a month ago, for the podcast audience. The talk centers on the new flexibilities, the particulars of just what constitutes off-duty time for an owner-operator, a variety of scenarios posed by those who were participating live in the discussion, and much more about the rule.
Will roadside inspectors be ready? Will ELD providers? Are you?
The original presentation DeLorenzo gave was broadcast with a few slides that it’s pretty easy to follow along with if you have them. You can download them here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2020/09/FMCSA-HOS-Outreach-Slides-Final-2020-09-25-11-43.pdf
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Sep 22, 2020
Custom cabover emerges as tribute to a driver's pride, from former Viking hauler
Owner-operators across the country probably remember the LTL doubles and triples hauler Viking Freight, before a buyout by FedEx folded the company under the FedEx Freight umbrella with another, American Freightways, in the early part of this century. A special treat for you today in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast with Steve Sprenger, a commercial real estate broker for the last couple of decades following work in trucking with about a decade hauling for Viking from the mid-1980s. Sprenger's finally concluded what’s been a decade-and-then-some-long project in a full custom restoration of a 1983 single-drive-axle Kenworth cabover, a former Viking Freight truck he found in a yard in Northern California. Enlisting the initial help of NorCal Kenworth to make sure the rig was roadworthy for a trip back to his home area in Southern California those years ago, detail work commenced and took on a life of its own over time. The end result is a fitting tribute, he believes, to a c…
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Sep 11, 2020
Hear the 2020 Trucker Talent Search -- and intro'ing Jason Keeler's custom shop
You can catch the performances also in video via OverdriveOnline.com or at http://youtube.com/overdrivemag -- herein find audio of the entire show, building to Tennessee-based John Malayter performing his own "Take Me Back to Tennessee" for the win. Before we take a run through all the performances, including fellow talent search finalists Freddy French and Paul Cullers, "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer returns to the podcast mic, as it were, via a 2019 interview with Keeler Custom Truck Restoration owner-operator Jason Keeler of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, detailing his history and one spectacular 1950 Kenworth W923. At podcast's end: A couple minutes’ worth of KTA600 Cummins-powered 1950 Kenworth action. Enjoy it, and thanks to Paul Marhoefer and Jason Keeler for the audio.
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Sep 4, 2020
How to manage for downside risk in turbulent trucking times
This year has no doubt been a wild ride in any number of different ways for every one of you, I’m guessing. Whether you’re leased to a carrier and newly dealing with regular customers’ facility restrictions and the necessity of new personal protective equipment on-site or at once routinely familiar and now sometimes ever-stranger-seeming truck stops along regular routes. Maybe you’re an independent who’s experienced the topsy-turvy rate situation along with that, from the highest of highs of late and those lowest of lows in April and May. Whatever your individual case, there's something for you in this talk with our own contributing writer Gary Buchs and well-known satellite radio host and fellow owner-operator coach Kevin Rutherford in large part on best practices in a time like the present.
How can an owner-operator effectively manage the business when future market prospects are basically a crapshoot? Plenty of answers, here. Many of them re-emphasize tried-and-true busin…
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Aug 26, 2020
Trucker Talent Search preview -- the performers, their hauling histories and songs
So much can come from a song, and its connection to the work that its writer or performer does otherwise. The culture forged and re-forged by the connections between the individual performers who've taken part in Overdrive's Trucker Talent Search over the years, and hopefully those among you who have the opportunity to really make a similar connection with them through their work, well … for this podcaster's money, this effort since its very first year has always felt in a way perhaps the most meaningful work I’ve been involved in at Overdrive. We all hope it thrives for the foreseeable future, and that you’re a part of it.
Tune in on Overdrive's Facebook page -- http:;//facebook.com/OverdriveTrucking -- Friday, August 28, at 7 p.m. Central for the final performance from Talent finalists Freddy French, Paul Cullers and John Malayter, bookended by some extra entertainment from these trucking-music leading lights, both past Talent Search participants in a variety of ways themselve…
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Aug 21, 2020
One Big Cam-powered 1970 KW's long transformation -- and the value of inspections
With the Brake Safety Week upcoming August 23-29, tank doubles-pulling independent Martin Herman, based in Wyoming, is sure to be ready. In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we talk inspections, for sure, but more so his half-century-old 1970 Kenworth needlenose W925, quite an exceptional rig. Herman regular Overdrive readers may well recall as the owner-op who engineered replacement parts and even used a turbo from a Cummins N14 to retrofit to the Big Cam 3 that powered the KW. Since we last checked in with Herman, that motor is no more, as you’ll hear. ... Hear more in the podcast, and find pictures of the unit via http://overdriveonline.com/channel19
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Aug 6, 2020
Hauling smart -- and high, wide and ugly -- with Owner-Operator of the Year Kevin Kocmich
The complications that can be brought on by any overdimensional load’s permitted complexity are many, and extend to the routes those permits send you on, of course. The bigger or heavier the load gets, the more circuitous and lengthy the route, often enough. It can make for a cumbersome process when it comes to weighing whether the price of any load is worth the effort and cost put in. Owner-Operator of the Year Kevin Kocmich has mastered such deliberations over his decades in business. For more on his operation, listen to this podcast or find our May cover story on heavy specialized hauling via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/big-equipment-loads-pay-specialized-heavy-hauling/
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Jul 13, 2020
'We're supposed to be in this thing together': Level 3 inspection advice with Kansas trooper
You read a little about this week's podcast subject last week, likely, with reporting around the Operation Safe Driver Week traffic-enforcement event (focused on motorists as well as professional operators) ongoing as we speak. Namely -- the Level 3 inspection and Kansas Highway Patrol trooper and Public Information Officer Nick Wright, whose advice related to how to prep for an inspection was delivered in this conversation from early March. He and I were talking in the context of the three-day Roadcheck inspection event, then scheduled for early May, where the full Level 1 driver and vehicle inspection is what often enough is the focus of the event. Before it was postponed, though, CVSA had named the theme of the annual event as driver-related violations, from medical certification status to ELDs and hours of service – the things hit on by those Level 3 inspections.
That just so happens to also be the inspection level most likely to accompany any roadside stop, which the Operation…
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Jul 2, 2020
'Twice as good': Rico Muhammad on race-related opportunity barriers, trucking and otherwise
In the first part of this two-part podcast, owner-operator and Rates & Lanes Podcast cohost Rico Muhammad detailed his views on policing issues and his personal experiences with unjustified actions throughout his life. In part 2, a discussion of opportunity barriers that exist for many in African-American communities where, as Muhammad says, kids are often counseled they must be "twice as good" as white counterparts to achieve the same level of success. Cynical though the adage may be, the truth of the matter is closer to the notion that there's work left to be done by all of us in living up to the everyone's-created-equal ideal enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, when it comes to opportunity. Find Part 1 of this series via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/difficult-conversations-race-in-trucking-u-s-culture-owner-op-rico-muhammad/
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Jun 25, 2020
Having the 'difficult conversations': Race in trucking, wider U.S. culture with Rico Muhammad
Atlanta-based Rico Muhammad regulat listeners may well recall from past Overdrive Radio editions covering a variety of issues, from electronic logging device choices ahead of the mandate back in 2017 to a variety of other business topics. Muhammad's also the host of a weekly audio program in the Rate & Lanes podcast available via http://BlogTalkRadio.com/rates.
In this week's Overdrive Radio, Muhammad speaks to the movement that's gathered steam nationally in response to killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, in addition to a rash of deaths of African-American citizens in the hands of police around the nation, among other atrocities.
He details some of his own experiences as an African-American when it comes to police interactions -- from the first but not only time he had a gun pulled on him by an officer, when he was just a boy in his early teens, to today's much more smooth though not always pleasant routine interactions at scale houses that all operators deal with in varying de…
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Jun 3, 2020
Transparency in high demand, though seldom formally sought: Part 2 with broker Paul Berman
What does East Coast Transport Vice President of Logistics Paul Berman think about all the talk around potentially new requirements for freight-transaction transparency, and the existing regs? That was, after all, partly the question Berman joined me for this two-part edition of Overdrive Radio to answer to begin with. The answer is complicated, and involves honest questioning of the utility of after-the-load rate transparency for any owner-operator and more.
What's not so complicated is Berman's answer to the question of just how his own company handles right-to-review requests under 49 CFR 371.3, the current reg that requires brokers to make records, including the brokerage fees assessed to the shipper, available to carriers upon request. That regulation, and the potential for its enforcement outside of carrier, broker and shipper contracts, played a big part in May’s protest actions by truckers in D.C., of course. And the existence of contract language in some instances requiri…
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May 29, 2020
Part 1: Transparency, history, strategy from the other side of the fence with a food-industry broker
View from the broker, Part 1. East Coast Transport's logistics VP Paul Berman has been around trucking, and particularly the food-freight side of things, since the 1970s and also happens to be a former owner-operator himself. He sat down with Overdrive Radio for an expansive talk on the history of brokerage in trucking and the evolution of the spot market into a sort of market-within-a-market, with plenty of downsides when pursued to the exclusion of tried-and-true strategies toward business relationships built on mutual trust, fairness and need. As the current crisis has done so much to expose bad actors among brokerages and spur a push for greater fairness, Berman emphasizes that there are plenty good guys out there among brokers, and owner-operators would do well to spend personal capital on setting up for the long haul. It's the regular partners who will sustain you through the next downturn, no doubt. In Part 2 next week, we'll talk with Berman about how current transparency regs…
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May 26, 2020
Sleeper splits toward 'Knights of the Highway' Revival? Trucker and author Ed Miller's new memoir
A longer talk here with Maryland-headquartered Ed Miller, now retired from trucking and the author of a memoir called “A Trucker’s Tale: Wit, Wisdom and True Stories from 60 Years on the Road.” It’s an intimate portrait of a life lived in trucking, from a kid in Western North Carolina changing tires for his father and grandfather’s trucking company, to the driver’s seat himself stateside and in Vietnam as a Navy Seabee, to managing shipper relationships and/or operation back in this or that trucking-company office or terminal. First, though, at the top, a few more readers’ responses to the hours of service final rule that FMCSA announced not quite two weeks ago. Caller look on changes to the split sleeper rules as advantageous to safety, given the ability now of the shorter period in the split to stop the 14-hour clock as long as it’s at least two hours long, according to the text of the rule itself. Miller, ultimately, hopes new changes might bring about more ability t…
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May 15, 2020
D.C., transparency, hours changes and more with independent Bryan Hutchens
This edition features a talk with Generations Express independent owner-operator Bryan Hutchens, and we’ll get to how he feels about the hours of service changes released just yesterday and set to go into effect es early as September. Regular listeners and Overdrive readers may well remember Hutchens from an organizing role he assumed with others around last year’s That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C. outreach effort on the National Mall in October. The last couple of months, he’s seen business slow down a good bit, as have so many, and sold the business’s second truck, a 2007 model, early in the pandemic period, reducing costs. His insurance renewal came up, too, and his agent was able to shop coverage around and found insurers rather aggressively competing with each other – he got a substantial reduction, so maybe, just maybe there’s a bright spot in all this. The owner-operator spent parts of Tuesday and Wednesday this week in D.C. with his 1996 Peterbilt 379 and 53-foot step dec…
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May 1, 2020
Words to truck by: 'You will never, ever come out ahead running at a loss’
Owner-operators Daniel and Phyllis Snow have been off the road refusing to run at a loss for going on a month now as rates and available freight volumes have fallen. The crisis spurred by the COVID-19 coronavirus' spread, though, comes after a rough year of its own. To put everything in context, Daniel says, on the same miles run in 2019, the Snows were able to gross only around 60 percent of revenue they brought in 2013. Market deterioration has been the rule the past year, and they're not the only independent owner-op carriers who feel like the spot market is just broken. The pair have been in spend-reduction mode as they try to hold on for some return.
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Apr 24, 2020
Questionable offer of easy money 'without asking for any business equity'
Questionable offer of easy money 'without asking for any business equity' by Overdrive
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Apr 17, 2020
A tough week's diversion with music, trucking in pursuit of truth
In what has been perhaps the toughest week for trucking as an owner-operator in the last decade, this edition of Overdrive Radio offers some diversion via an interview with Haley Fohr of Chicago-based "Jackie Lynn," whose new record proceeds from a conception of the character for whom the band is named as a long-hauler with a particularly spectacular rig -- a mirrored vessel that carries the weight of the world it inhabits. The record, called "Jacqueline," is the group's second, among Fohr's other songwriting/performing projects. Also: Our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer offers two of his pensive, funny, and sometimes moving dispatches from the COVID-19 road, happy for the grocery, food and beverage loads but facing near impossible decisions in other ways ...
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Apr 10, 2020
Do the hard work now: COVID-19 business, health support insights
Nearing the end of the first week of the SBA disaster-assistance loan programs available to owner-operators, insight in this Overdrive Radio edition from longtime owner-operator and now trucking-business coach Gary Buchs. In a time like this, look ahead to the relationships that you need to establish -- whether with a health-care provider, a broker or shipper customer, and indeed as Buchs suggests, a bank … those relationships you’ll need to be able to leverage when times get tough again. If you don’t have those relationships now, there’s no time like the present to establish them. You may not be able to meet face to face with your banker in the right here, right now, but pick up the phone and get things start. More detail here on both the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Disaster Injury loans, variously forgiveable, now standing up and available.
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Apr 1, 2020
Follow the orange ribbon to Logan's lunch for truckers, at I-79 W.Va. rest area -- and more support
Special thanks to 13-year-old Logan Miller in this April Fool's Day edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, no kidding. Miller is the young man I wrote a little about on Friday, who's been serving sack lunches in appreciation of professional drivers at the I-79 rest area in West Virginia, southbound side just inside the Pennsylvania state line. Logan Miller has partnered on an "Orange Ribbon Campaign" with the folks at Trucks With Room to Spare, and attempt to promote the use of orange ribbons by businesses and individuals offering various measures of direct support to owner-operators and other drivers out there who need it in these times out on the road.
Logan is the son of West Virginia-based owner-operator Jason Miller, who's been trucking through the COVID-19 crisis leased to Mercer Transportation with his International. Hear more about the Orange Ribbon Campaign, and when you can expect Logan lunch to be back available on I-79 in the near future, in this week's podcast.
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Mar 25, 2020
'This thing is on': Methods amid the mess, madness around COVID-19
Three examples of a new intensity of appreciation not only of professional drivers amid the COVID-19 crisis, but also from the professionals for those out there on the road with them in support, from fuel desk personnel to sanitary workers and so many more. Interviews: Ingrid Brown on hauling produce in and out of Hunt's Pont. Paul Marhoefer narrates the first two weeks' worth of the virus spread and the hoarding that's come with it.
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Mar 13, 2020
Professional appreciation, and more on an owner-op-designed solar aux power system
Owner-operator Chad Fowler's "Solar Peterbilt" 1996 379 springs from a motivation more owner-operators are acting on with the increasing availability of relatively affordable solar panels, whether like Fowler's of the type built for stationary use or the more flexible variety built for mobile application. A look on his mostly maintenance-free power system (a big step forward from diesel APU-type power, Fowler believes, in that respect) and a message of appreciation from a purchasing and receiving staffer out in Spokane, Wash., a result of the Overdrive collaboration with PRX's Radiotopia podcast network on Over the Road. Hear those episodes via http://overtheroad.fm or at Overdrive's website starting with Episode 1: https://www.overdriveonline.com/over-the-road-episode-1-biggest-tailgate-trucking/
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Feb 25, 2020
In defense of truckers? FMCSA Chief Jim Mullen on hours, nuclear verdicts, more in Charlotte talk
Speaking to a gathering of the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association last week in Charlotte, N.C., while digging in on a view that the ELD mandate is a safety-positive rule, FMCSA Acting Administrator Jim Mullen made it clear he believed the flawed rigidity of the hours rules needed significant modification for drivers, and trumpeted the agency's efforts to promote the true safety-plus image of trucking as we know it. Such efforts could help stem the tide of so-called "nuclear verdicts" sought by ambulance-chasing lawyers from carriers large and small unlucky enough to be involved in most any crash, whether at fault or not. Along the way, Mullen revealed viewpoints on other trucking subjects, including the CSA program, that some owner-operators will at the least find familiar, if not exactly laudatory. His talk, annotated by Overdrive Senior Editor Todd Dills, here.
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Feb 12, 2020
For the love of ... Patty the traveling road dog, with owner-op Rob Goodwin
Let’s hear it for the self-described "door-swinger," everybody. That’d be current reefer hauler and former and still sometime step-decker and flatbedder Rob Goodwin, based up in the Texas panhandle and today running leased to a very small carrier. We'll hear how he got there, following some years running a small fleet with his authority, a run-in with a bad broker that cost him well north of 10 grand, and plenty business recalibration back to a one-truck affair. The last two years, too, he's found what might be the greatest ride-along companion a dog lover could ask for in his Patty the Traveling Road Dog. Also in the podcast: Introducing Overdrive's collaboration with PRX's Radiotopia podcast network -- "Over the Road," debuting Feb. 20. Catch the audio trailer with Long Haul Paul Marhoefer here. Visit http://overtheroad.fm to subscribe.
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Jan 31, 2020
$50 and a little install work could save your life: Trucker Scott Carlson's close call
The voice of trucker Scott Carlson dominates this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, detailing a little piece of equipment he’s got in his truck, as do the rest of the trucks in the fleet he's driven for for 17 years out of New York state. This little device, he knows, likely saved his life last week.
The equipment? A simple carbon monoxide detector. An exhaust leak from his diesel-powered APU happened to have broken in the exact wrong spot, just below a vent for fresh cab air. Fortunately for him, the fleet’s trucks had been outfitted years earlier with detectors (Safe-T-Alert by RV-centric manufacturer MTI Industries) hardwired for power from the trucks' batteries and mounted low on the sleeper wall down near where Carlson lays his head when asleep -- recommended for these kinds of applications. The company's fleetwide investment in the units followed a leased owner-operator]s similar situation, though caused by a leak in the truck's primary exhaust system, that sen…
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Jan 24, 2020
How former heavy-haul owner-op and current fuel hauler Lonnie Laurie became the 'one-armed bandit'
It wasn't a result of the kind of accident we most think about when it comes to hauling freight on the highways -- rather, it involved a set of monster trucks then-owner-operator Lonnie Laurie ran in rallies, the "Michigan Ice Monster" and "Neighborhood Nightmare," as they were known. Airing up a flat on one of them after an event Memorial Day weekend in 1994, the worst happened, as you'll hear him tell the story in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio. Periodically now, he says, "some people call me the 'one-armed bandit.'" Undeterred by now being without his right arm, Laurie, in his 20s at the time of the accident, went on to haul as an owner-operator out of his native Quincy, Michigan, for some time serving the auto industry with a Landoll tilt trailer, then with a move to Minnesota eventually launching a lawn care and landscaping business that morphed into an excavating and heavy-haul fleet of 12 trucks. Today, he says, he's found a long-term work home hauling fuel from an Arizo…
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Jan 15, 2020
Truckers together in pursuit of victories over child abuse
The notion in the title of this podcast is, at least, the goal of Western Flyer Express founder Rodney Timms, based in Oklahoma and also the founder of the All Truckers Together Against Child Abuse org. In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, find Timms' impassioned plea to the trucking community to join his effort in pursuit of victories large and small in a fight against child abuse, which is ultimately quite personal for him. As Christenson-leased owner-operator and regular Overdrive Extra Clifford Petersen memorably told his own and part of Timms' story some months back, Rodney Timms has written about his experience growing up in an abusive situation in a book call "My Three Angles." He details part of that, including an incident when he was 15 and his own father beat him within an inch of his life on the roadside of an Oklahoma highway, in this week's podcast, with further detail of how he came to start the organization two years back.
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Jan 7, 2020
Whose 'Autonomy'? The independent owner-operator and tech skeptic featured in new film
As with advancing driver-assist techs in chaotic on-highway situations and wild weather, perhaps, the real world intrudes on podcast recordings, too. While I spoke with Walkabout Transport independent Debbie Desiderato about her brief appearance in a documentary film on, and her skepticism about, the advancements in driver assist technologies, her dog Bubba was startled by a deer or other animal near the Virginia home she keeps today. Hear him bark toward the tail end of the audio, where we also ask: Ever had your business impersonated by a scammer with a broker? Desiderato and a vigilant broker recently had just such an experience. How such a scam runs: An individual misrepresents him- or herself as an independent to a broker in hopes of getting the load and a fuel advance, then disappearing into the ether. If you've ever been involved in an investigation of such a scam, leave a message on our podcast line at 530-408-6423 -- we'd love to hear from you about the experience.
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Dec 27, 2019
Countdown through a parking shortage, tech surge, truck boot ... 2019's Top 10 episodes
Let’s get ready to say goodbye to 2019 on the Overdrive Radio podcast. Christmas is in the books and, soon, so will be the year, so we’re taking a trip down memory lane via the top 10 most-listened-to episodes of Overdrive Radio this year, with some honorable mentions, too, covering a boatload of ground all told: From trucking history to shutdowns and slow rolls, parking and booting, the ELD mandate and hours of service, small fleet business, working the spot market and so much more ... Bonus at the end: A special little sing-along with "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. Run through the full top ten podcasts (in reverse order) via this link to a playlist rounding them up: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/2019-year-in-review-the-top-10
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Dec 20, 2019
How to get more time for a malfunctioning ELD, entry level training redux, more
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, listener Regi Rinear wonders at the risk for a company or leased operator of running with paper logs when ELDs are required, with little assurance that support personnel had done what was necessary to, if ultimately needed, extend the eight-day period FMCSA gives any carrier and/or driver experiencing an ELD malfunction. Herein: How to get that grace-period extension. Also: More on the Entry Level Training Rule and its likely delay with operator Scott Hainline, who was trained twice, in entirely different trucking eras, bookended by a career in law enforcement. For our previous talk with Hainline: https://www.overdriveonline.com/with-training-rule-delay-in-the-offing-operator-scott-hainline-compares-own-70s-2010s-training/
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Dec 13, 2019
The methodical tour, by 'Choice,' from corporate America to a small flatbed fleet
Fredrick "Choice M.A.S." Claxton of New York caught the trucking bug on a two-wheeled cross-country tour on a Suzuki street bike, no less. His friends told him he was crazy at the time, as he notes some truckers will now for a preference for the challenge, for instance, of crowded I-95 in the Northeast, or the curves and ups and downs of Rocky Mountain roads out West. He set his mind to making a move, after that big cross-country trip, from work with one of most recognizable names in apparel to where he eventually landed today, three years and some months later, with small fleet I-65 Transport, based in Indiana. He runs with a flatbed behind him in a Peterbilt, and has his sights set on a future in trucking, and bringing others along with him in success. Hear more in this Overdrive Radio edition, too, and his and colleagues' Truckers Feeding the Homeless support initiative, with another outreach event planned for July in Baltimore. Read more about the organization's past efforts viahtt…
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Dec 6, 2019
Training rule delay in the offing, operator Scott Hainline compares own '70s, 2010s training
Yes, we've heard from the off-the-record sources, too. With the training rule delay set to be made official any day now, operator Scott Hainline of Illinois notes he's just as hopeful as other operators for real safety improvement with training practices standardization –- at least when it comes to raising the bar for minimum standards. His perspective is interesting because he was initially trained back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As with so many owner-operators starting out during that time and even up through the present day in some cases, Hainline learned through an informal apprenticeship with a fuel hauler in his area, which you’ll hear more about in the conversation that follows here. By the early 1990s, though, he’d left trucking behind for a career in law enforcement, retiring just several years ago, whereupon he decided to re-enter trucking. What he found upon retraining for his CDL with a community-college program, though, he felt lacked in several different are…
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Nov 28, 2019
Talent Search winner Taylor Barker's new musical bonds; Brumbach Stephens hauls one giant tree
in this edition of Overdrive Radio we’re talking music, and the Capitol Christmas Tree haul, and a recording session that happened November 23 in Nashville. Kingsport, Tenn.-based owner-operator Taylor Barker won this year’s edition of Overdrive’s own Trucker Talent Search, held annually at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas. Part of the prize for the big win is a recording session at Jay’s Place in Nashville on Music Row, with longtime producer-engineer and session player himself Jay Vernali. “It's Saturday night on Music Row,” as Jay set the scene -- where the magic happens, as it were. A window here into Taylor Barker's history in music and trucking, and the singer-songwriter's plans for the recording. Also: Brumbach Stephens on his experience piloting the final third of the haul of this Capitol Christmas Tree in a specially wrapped KW W990. Brumbach, a former small fleet owner-operator now principally in sales with Wilbanks Trucking, spelled out some of the deta…
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Nov 21, 2019
Occupied vehicle booting: No, it does not happen to cars; More 10-4 voices
As Michigan-based small fleet owner Leander Richmond said in the last edition of Overdrive Radio. No, it doesn’t happen to drivers of cars, it does not happen to campers – it does, often enough, happen to truckers. He was talking about the phenomenon of private-lot or other booting of trucks in which drivers are sleeping, most often during federally mandated rest periods, of course. As so many of you likely saw last week with a report from a Dandridge, Tenn., Speedway fuel-stop location, that can include tow trucks hooked up to you while you rest, with a fee required to unhook. Richmond, as he noted in the last podcast, believes there should be a prohibition on booting or hooking to an occupied vehicle in this manner, and it’s a subject we’ll be covering in more depth in a later issue of Overdrive. For now, in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast some sound piece of advice before parking in any spot where you have doubt about the possibility of a tow-hook or boot in your…
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Nov 8, 2019
The truck booting trap, and one small fleet owner's crusade for a solution
Small fleet owner Leander Richmond's efforts to fight the egregious practice of booting trucks when drivers are asleep in the bunk have been written about before -- he's been successful when booters violate local ordinances that govern their businesses, or in one recent case he details here didn’t even have a contract with a particular property owner to be doing what he was doing on the property. Local and/or state laws around booting and towing vary considerably, as he’s most certainly found in his efforts to raise awareness among truckers and law enforcement about the more predatory boots in that business. Here, what he sees as a possible solution to a problem exacerbated by the ELD mandate and its parking-related ripple effects along all manner of routes around the nation. Picture of Richmond here by Denise Marhoefer.
Also in the podcast: A window into one of the conversations with participants in "That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C.," which happened early last month on the National Ma…
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Oct 29, 2019
'Highways and heart attacks' to trucker Will Beeley's place in the American songbook
Thanks to the Tompkins Square record label and the man behind the voice you hear in the song at the top here, Will Beeley. Beeley's new “Highways and Heart Attacks” record is the singer-songwriter and hazmat pressurized tank hauler's third. Today, Beeley lives in New Mexico, with roots in Texas. His story in music reaches back to his youth in the late 1960s, runs through an iconic record label in Jackson, Mississippi and extends on up into the present day, with his new record following 40 years after his last, called “Passing Dream.” Nashville-based music writer Edd Hurt views that 1979 slab as an overlooked classic in the American songbook. On this edition of Overdrive Radio, take a run through parts of Edd Hurt’s and my own interviews with Beeley attendant to a special treat in the day to day of this trucking-business writer back in September. Beeley was in Nashville performing attendant to Americana fest.
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Oct 18, 2019
No ‘crystal ball’ for FMCSA’s post-Martinez future; Jason Lee Wilson live in a cave
There's a new record forthcoming for 2016 Trucker Talent Search winning singer-songwriter Jason Lee Wilson, due in the new year. It's dubbed, simply, "Tennessee," and it's title track is an appreciation of home for the East Tennessee resident. He performed it as part of a three-song set at The Caverns venue in Pelham, Tenn., current home of the Bluegrass Underground television program -- you can hear it, and hear more about just where the song and the album are coming from, in today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. Also there, a talk with trucker/singer-songwriter Tony Justice about his recent performance in quite a nontraditional venue for many artists -- though not exactly for Justice himself: Bristol Motor Speedway, where he gave a post-race infield show for attendees of the Bandit Series big-rig-racing finale (congrats once again to Ricky "Rude" Proffitt for the season points championship). He also speaks to ongoing advocacy efforts of Trucker Nation, an organization he c…
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Oct 10, 2019
VP undercover in a large carrier's training program; Voices From 10-4 D.C.
Pam Wilson hired on with Utah-based large fleet C.R. England about a year ago as vice president of process development. That’s something of a fancy way of saying she was brought in with hopes of improving parts of the company that support those who make the it tick – that’s truck drivers, of course. At the time of Wilson’s hiring, as Aaron Huff wrote in Overdrive sister fleet publication CCJ earlier this year, among the large number of company-employed drivers that make up the over-the-road division (accounting for around 80 percent of the entire company’s drivers), “the large majority of its OTR drivers are in the process of completing the company’s 90-day training program after they have earned a CDL.” That represents a lot of turnover. Figuring out how to better set those new drivers up for success could pay dividends long-term, no doubt, company executives knew. The goal, as Wilson puts it, is to be a better safety net as a company, particularly important for those…
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Oct 2, 2019
California independent contractor fallout: 'Two-check' employee/contractor pay system explored
There's been more chatter about the old "two-check" system of pay for owner-operators contracted to carriers in the last year and more as fleets of all shapes and sizes in California or with California-based independent contractor owner-ops ponder what approach to take to preserve relationships with business relationships with owner-ops in the wake of the state's codification of the so-called "ABC" independent contractor classification test. California's newly passed bill establishes that test as the go-to one when determining the appropriateness of the independent contractor classification for workers in all manner of sectors and operations, trucking included. Unless there’s clear action in courts or something else that happens legislatively in the state, that will become the law of the land there the first month of next year. Though the two-check employee/contractor hybrid system for owner-operators is something a "dinosaur" in trucking today, some believe it could hold promise in…
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Sep 20, 2019
'Truck parking only': Working together toward a new get-in reality
The need for greater parking capacity, well-managed, throughout the nation is no secret. The need along Texas lanes was the subject of the lively discussion Overdrive held at the Great American Trucking Show last month, devoted to parking. In today’s podcast, you’ll get a full window into that discussion, aimed at engaging with Texas DOT freight planning branch manager Sherry Pifer and others from the agency as they re-evaluate their own approach to marshalling public resources and create partnership with private companies toward parking improvement. The discussion could well provide a model toward engaging with other states, too.
Along the way you’ll hear from a multitude of owner-operators, drivers and other drivers in attendance, as well as owner-operator Ingrid Brown, Clark Freight Lines driver Jack Smith and former owner-op Scott Grenerth, who moderated the discussion. Grenerth, as regular listerners will know, is part of the Truck Specialized Parking Service company.
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Sep 16, 2019
After the accident: First-responder superheroes, coping resources, first-person perspective
Overdrive Radio's rebroadcast of the Trucking Solutions Group's "accident-awareness" conference call, with interviews about the impetus for the event with owner-ops Vince Crisanti and Shane Rizzuto. Both operators were motivated in part by personal experience with crashes on the roadways, and hopeful that "anyone who touches a seatbelt" could benefit from the input of firefighter, police and water rescue first-responders who presented. Also: Resources for dealing with the personal aftermath of any major accident, with some first-person stories of coping from more than one trucker and family member. One comes from Monica Stevens, widow of Harry Pierce, pictured with his ridealong dog, Blue, who survived Pierce's tragic crash.
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Sep 6, 2019
Engineering realities v. hyperactive marketing: The 'driverless' trucking future explored
Something a little different on Overdrive Radio today – the podcast will transport you like so many futuristic teleporting time machines to a Thursday, Aug. 22, panel at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas. That panel was all about the notion of a “driverless” truck and where drivers really fit in as such a thing gets closer to real. Find a brief contemporaneous report from the panel, a discussion with Starsky Robotics' Paul Schlegel and Pronto's Ognen Stojanovski, via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/drivers-role-in-driverless-trucks-explored-in-gats-panel/
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Aug 29, 2019
Trucker Talent Search: The performances; And more on hours amid comment period
In this Overdrive Radio podcast edition, run through the performances by competing truckers Jason Henley, "Mississippi Ken" Freeman and the ultimate talent search winner, Taylor Barker, live from the Great American Trucking Show a week ago. Also: A warm-up three-song act by Paul Marhoefer and Tony Justice's homespun emcee-ing of the event, an ongoing anchor among the community of musicians who also happened to haul freight on the open road, or vice versa, as it were. Thirdly: Near the top, a brief talk with Pennsylvania-based owner-operator Mike Landis, also of the United States Transportation Alliance, about his view of the FMCSA's hours of service proposal, including a bit of clarification of how the rule views computation of the split-sleeper options it's proposing.
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Aug 28, 2019
Special edition: FMCSA's GATS hours of service listening session
If you missed the Great American Trucking Show or the FMCSA's webcast last week, you can sit in on the first hour and more of the hours of service listening session held at GATS in Dallas Aug. 23, 2019, via this special presentation of Overdrive Radio. This was the first listening session held by the FMCSA following its introduction of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that offered some changes to truckers aimed at increasing both safety and some measure of flexibility for drivers.
Two significant elements of that were revisions to split-sleeper-berth regs as well as the proposal to allow up to a three-hour pause to the 14-hour duty clock daily with an off-duty mid-period break. Read more about the proposed changes via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/stop-the-clock-proposed-hours-of-service-overhaul-would-allow-drivers-to-pause-14-hour-clock/
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Aug 24, 2019
18 years old and hauling in 1917; Leon Everette, Long Haul Paul from GATS
Wednesday night in Dallas, classic country star and gospel singer Leon Everette, with trucker-songwriter Bill Weaver, started us up with a sound-check of sorts that turned into an impromptu extended jam -- you'll hear some of that and more in this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. (Paul Marhoefer, too.) And though the news has been dominated this week and the previous one by the hours of service, we sit down at GATS for a chat about history, training and more with Jay Thompson of Transportation Business Associates. He grew up in rural Indiana and starting his working career driving big trucks, a route taken by the generations of men in his family as well, all the way back to his grandfather, Walter Thompson. Walter had a chauffer’s license at age 18, in 1917, and given we’re talking today as an industry about the potential for a pilot program for under-21 CDL drivers, we sat down to ferret out a little bit of the history there. As Thompson says, history often repeats i…
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Aug 16, 2019
Mailbag: Worm turns on regs favorability with hours proposal, readers sound off
Readers weigh in largely favorably on FMCSA's this-week-proposed hours of service changes. Any of these changes have quite an interesting road ahead of them in the next year or however long it takes for the agency to push them through. So-called "safety advocates" are already howling to mainstream news outlets -– stories are being spread far and wide with editorialized headlines like “Trump administration moves to relax rules on how long truckers can drive”… You may have seen that one or some variant on it -- the headline the L.A. Times put on the Associated Press story about the rules. It’s not a terrible story, all things considered, despite the headline. At once, it does lead in part with what feels like the nut the way it’s presented: “highway safety groups have warned that putting the revisions into place would dangerously weaken the regulations.” Well … nothing new there. Though as noted the headline itself is just flat wrong, or at the least misleading, as it p…
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Aug 7, 2019
What would you do for another 1-2 mpg in fuel mileage?
What would you do for another mile or two per gallon in running fuel mileage? How does a six-year odyssey in modifications to your truck’s engine and related systems, reducing the draw on the engine from the main fan and A/C and more sound? That’s in essence what thinker-tinker, so to speak, inventor, and independent owner-operator Kenny Capell did. Based in East Tennessee, Kenny continues to modify his own Freightliner Columbia and Detroit to get to the point where not only is he achieving about a mile-and-a-half overall running fuel mileage benefit. He's moving toward also eliminating idling entirely with the integrated system, now officially patented by himself and his sister, Patti Lane. Pictured here: The modified engine fan with four electric fans -- one among many aspects of the custom-designed system.
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Jul 30, 2019
Longtime TA Nashville employees recount historic 2010 flood, support and recovery
Up from water: This week's Overdrive Radio podcast edition features the voices of six current longtime staff of the Nashville downtown TravelCenters of America location. It’s certainly a unique stop with its proximity to the city center, likewise just a few city blocks' worth of distance from the banks of the mighty Cumberland River. TA Nashville’s continued existence at its now 40-year location is remarkable further for what happened nine years ago this past May, when over the weekend of May 1-2, 2010 the city and surrounding region got almost 20 inches of torrential rain in some areas, flooding the city’s drainage system, area creeks among other tributaries and, ultimately, that nearby mighty river. In this podcast, longtime staff from the stop and the region recount their experiences watching the water come up, and what happened there in the aftermath.
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Jul 19, 2019
More flexible sleeper splits: It didn’t take long for this newbie team to see potential value
You’ll be hard-pressed to come across cooler heads than those of the husband-wife team pair of relative trucking newbies I had the pleasure of sitting down with in Hartsville, Tenn., several weeks back. Tommy and Linda Bryant have about a year over the road as a company team with Old Time Express, pulling a dry van and, generally, loving life together after their mid-life switch to the work. For this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, we drop into Hartsville Old Time office, where I met the Bryants. Before trucking, with the kids grown and out of the house, Tommy and Linda were already basically spending the vast majority of their days together running a small Hartsville café, the Early Bird, today owned and operated by a son. A road trip taken in a four-wheeler out west, though, gave them an idea of how they could get even closer, and for longer, maximizing as a unit that precious commodity of time, together, as Tommy puts it. What are you doing with work but selling your time to a…
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Jul 11, 2019
A truckstop in the halls of Congress, and a hotshot carrier's data-use-transparency hopes
Dispatch here from the day the truck stop came to the U.S. Congress with Truckstop.com’s Chief Relationship Officer Brent Hutto. Hutto testitifed recently before a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee about the position of technology providers in the freight ecosystem, the potential for electronic permitting, the importance of funding road maintenance and more. Regarding the latter, his thoughts here include illustration of just how road deterioration makes the No. 1 reason owner-ops go out business much more likely to come to fruition -- that’s a major mechanical failure, of course, hastened by bad roads. Also here: Jon Gavrilyuk of hotshot-focused Safe Way Carrier out of central Missouri on issues of data usage, personal privacy, competition and Safe Way’s operation.
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Jun 28, 2019
40 years of trucking — and surviving — with owner-op Ingrid Brown; Plus: Talent finalists’ tunes
Owner-operator Ingrid Brown started trucking as a teenager in 1979, and she's been on the road since. In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast: Her reflections on her 40-year career, many of those spent as a single-truck owner-operator, as well as her recent involvement in FMCSA's Our Roads, Our Safety campaign and her ongoing bout with various forms of skin cancer. Also — a listen to the three songs that earned three truckers finalists spots in this year's Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search.
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Jun 13, 2019
Preventing skin cancer: 'The sun will hunt you down' in the truck
So says retired trucker Joe Jolly out of Kansas, who was recently treated for a small spot of aggressive skin cancer on his face. He has a message for young drivers who aren't thinking about their in-cab sun exposure. Put fairly succinctly, you might say the sun is “trying to kill you” from the day you’re born, as Joe puts it. Anything you can do to protect yourself from damaging ultraviolet radiation while trucking over the road today will pay dividends in later years. We talk about that throughout this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. Also: a quick walk through a bit of our contributing writer, trucker and singer-songwriter Paul Marhoefer’s recording session in Muscle Shoals last week. There, he laid down an original track that will also serve as the theme for a new special-edition podcast we’ve been working on . Hear a little of "Over the Road" here.
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May 30, 2019
'Tennessee Alabama Fireworks': The new record from Nashville-based singer-songwriter Boo Ray
Ride along with Overdrive Senior Editor Todd Dills and Nashville singer-songwriter Boo Ray on a tour through Ray's latest, named after a familiar site on I-24 anyone who's run west from Chattanooga will recognize. The record starts with a trio of road songs in which there's no shortage of mirth, pathos and more.
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May 24, 2019
The first Penn. Make-a-Wish convoy, remembered, and: OOIDA highway-bill priorities
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we get a clear window onto the fist Make-A-Wish convoy from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with former trucker George Ruelens. He was hauling for Ned Bard & Son at the time, with no idea what he and the 41 other truckers were doing that day would go on to become a veritable institution in the region around Lancaster County -- the annual Mother’s Day convoy benefiting the Make-a-Wish foundation. This year, the convoy featured 650 trucks in its 30th year, a huge amount of growth over the course of three decades from the first one. Ruelens narrates his experience of that first one, and looks back fondly on the day and subsequent editions of the convoy, which have created so many memories for children involved -- truckers, too, no doubt, and members of the community in that area. Also in the podcast: With highway-funding measures being introduced in the House, President Trump pledges not to work w/ Dems on it, objecting to ongoing invest…
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May 13, 2019
Runaway on I-64 down Sandstone Mountain, and revisiting an accurate rate prediction pre-ELDs
South Carolina-based owner-operator Lee Epling echoes retired veteran hauler Gordon Alkire's perspective in the previous edition of Overdrive Radio, in which Alkire spoke on the tragic Colorado crash several weeks back. Epling, in turn, likewise urged caution pointing the finger before all the facts are known. Along the way, Epling shares his own brake-failure story on Sandstone Mountain in W.Va./Va. on I-64. Further, we talk with OOIDA board member Monte Wiederhold about what turned out to be a quite accurate prediction when it comes to spot market rates and the ELD mandate. While his small fleet's mostly shipper-direct freight benefited directly with gains that he hasn't lost in his contracts, the same cannot be said about the spot market, which adjusting for the rise in fuel in April was give or take some pennies per mile was more or less right back where it was in April of 2017. Wiederhold offers some perspective how to maintain in such an environment.
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May 3, 2019
In wake of Colo. crash, reserve judgment: Owner-op recounts '70s no-brakes run off Monteagle
A week ago Thursday began no doubt no shortage of investigation into the fiery Lakewood, Colorado, crash of Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, who lost control of his truck on a downhill grade and, ultimately, crashed, killing multiple people and sending multiple others to the hospital. In the wake of the tragedy for all involved, including the driver, who was charged with vehicular homicide among other counts, there’s been no small amount of finger-pointing to this or that cause. Gordon Alkire, retired owner-operator of Riley, Kan., reached out with a considered piece about such finger-pointing that you can read in full via the Channel 19 blog post for May 3 via http://OverdriveOnline.com/channel19. Alkire has little patience for such finger-pointing, and asks his fellow drivers to check their condemnation and take a close look at themselves. “Ask yourself if that could have been you?” he wrote. “A downgrade, a loaded trailer, no brakes. Confusion, fear, and panic.” He's been th…
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Apr 26, 2019
Custom walk-in storage at the front of a dry van; bulk tank niche explored
If regular listeners don’t recognize the first voice you hear in this podcast, that of Daniel Snow, he and his wife and business partner Phyllis' rig you're certain you'll remember. Christened “The Goose,” it’s a 1996 Freightliner Classic with 140 inches’ worth of a custom-redesigned ICT sleeper the Snows located and outfitted themselves for the comforts of home on the road about 7 years ago. Another project undertaken around the same time is a four-foot storage compartment they built into the front of their dry-van trailer, accessible from the tractor’s deck catwalk via a door assembly, to house tools and other supplies. From the first time we saw it last year, it certainly seemed like a modification with scads of potential for emulation by any single-trailer owner out there with mechanical expertise and, like the Snows, plenty of time spent on the road away from the comfort of home and established relationships with diesel shops you know well. Later in the podcast, too, a…