9/11 Where were you ?

                                         I was driving one like this at the time.

    I was just getting up from my 10 hour break at the "Wagon Wheel restaurant in Needles, California.

If you were lucky and got one of the half dozen parking spaces, you didn't have to park a block away across the street, and I got lucky. I went inside for some breakfast and found everyone glued to the tv looking at planes flying into the towers. No one could believe what they were seeing !

Thing had changed a lot in my life by then and have been changing ever since, not to inflect that that attack had anything to do with the changes.  Just sayin.

        Double bunk cabover "two story condo" was one of the first upgraded "class" trucks                             

The "ICC" and days of old !

 Most of the old farts like me have passed on and the new drivers have no idea how it was in the early days of trucking, so that lets the "DOT" get away with things that were unheard of back then.

At that time the "DOT" handled road repair and the "ICC" handled trucking. Carriers had to apply for authority to haul between points and publish their rates for shippers to see. Logs were used at that time as a measure of the company's compliance with "ICC" rules to grant them new authority, not like now, to punish drivers for trying to make a better living. I could go into a dissertation on logs at this point, but it would take up the whole post, so I'll leave that for later.

Suffice it to say that trucking was a skilled labor job until the DOT came aboard, [check some of my first post to get an idea of the skill it took to operate the rigs of that era] and the only difference between the pay you got for driving and the pay for working in a warehouse was the fact that you got to work twice as many hours so you made twice the pay, so for guys that didn't care that they didn't have a home life so they could have a bigger pay check, it made sense,

I brought that up because if you listen to "6 days on the road" in my last post, it speaks of the ICC is checking on down the line and I thought it would need explaining that they ran the scales and inspections, not the DOT. Trucking was a lot different then. We were more like the last American cowboy, which some ad agency used that very glorification, for awhile, combined with C. W. McCall's "CONVOY", [see other post], we were "Kings of the road" to many. 

Unfortunately, The very thing that drew everyone's attention to us was our downfall, The "C/B" ! 

Too many fowl mouth miscreants could hide behind the immunity of the radio to make anyone who listened very long, wonder what rock we crawled out from under, until c/b's and trucking became cuss words and caused the luster that we had worked for, to leave the industry forever.

Now we have automatic trans, air ride, air conditioning, cell phones portable tv's and all the comforts of a motor home instead of the spring ride, 2/70 ac [role 2 windows down and drive 70 mph ], 10 to 20 speed manual trans and all the "Good old Days" left behind.

Some trucking shows worth seeing again

 

When I started driving there wasn't any shows about trucking but you could always find a country western channel on radio, [that's about all you could find], that would almost always play a trucking song like "Truck Driven Man" or' 6 days on the road'. and then came the C/B, and C. W. McCall made us all famous with "CONVOY" and "Wolf Creek Pass" then some trucking shows like "Moven on" and "BJ and the bear", finally I guess, "Smoky and the Bandit" topped them off.

A lot of those channels played some very funny comedians also, like Jerry Clower, "The mouth of Mississippi" talking about "coon hunting," "A new Bull" and of coarse, "Marcels Talking Chain Saw".

By the way, one night I was west bound on I-20 and this truck started passing me, which didn't happen often, and when he got up beside me I noticed the name on his door, liked to fell out of the truck !

It was the very truck that was in the show "BJ and the Bear".  I got the driver to pull over, and after a short visit, found out that when they stopped the show they auctioned off the 3 trucks that they used and this guy bought 1 and leased it on with "BULLIT" freight out of Texas, I thought it was kind of neat.

Have fun checking these out, Dutch

                                                                 

live chicken hauler

Personal Protection !

Shifting a two stick Mack.

 Talking about Redwing Carriers in the last post reminded me of my first job after moving to Florida.

The guy that talked me into moving myself and family to Florida had lived there before and worked at Redwing, so we applied there the first day we arrived and both were hired. At that time it was called "Wyle-Redwing of which Lucile Ball owned part of Wyle Labs and later they sold Redwing and it was then called Redwing Carriers. The main business of Redwing was local, wet and dry bulk hauling, mostly in Florida and surrounding states. 

I had never pulled an unbaffled liquid tanker before so it was a new experience for me. We hauled molten sulfur from Ybor City, a suburb Tampa, to the chemical plants just east of Bartow on Rt 60 and depending if you were doing the sulfur/rock double or just the single sulfur run back to Tampa. The double would unload at Farmland or W.R. Grace and then go about 15 miles into the countryside to the phosphoric rock mines and pick up crushed rock in a saddle enclosure over the barrel tank. Then return, 3 rounds a night that took about 8 to 9 hours and paid the driver $13 per round or $39 a night. The single run just went to W.R. Grace and came back to Tampa empty. 4 loads a night that took 9 to 10 hours and  paid $9 per or $36. I preferred the singles which was a good thing because we were dispatched according to seniority which put me on the bottom anyway as everyone else wanted the doubles.

Now comes the good part!  Driving a two stick Mack has a learning curve from a week to a month depending on how coordinated you are. I had lots of experience with the duplex or triplex from some of my earlier jobs but, not while pulling an unbaffled tank. 

You never can fill the tank completely full due to product weight, so that allows room in the tank for the liquid to slosh from end to end and side to side constantly as long as your stopping or starting, slowing or adjusting your speed in traffic. With the weight of the load at around 40,000 lbs. you can imagine how hard it is to control and trying to shift when it's sloshing back and forth, as it is a timing problem because you are also timing your shift to match the motor and transmission so you can see the turmoil. 

It's not real bad in a Road Ranger 10 speed with just one gear shift but try it with a duplex, that if you get both boxes out of gear at the same time, all you can do is stop and start over. 

The road from Tampa  thru Bartow was usually packed with rush hour traffic when we got started at 6;oo p.m. and their was a lot of stopping and starting. The first week I drove an International city cab tractor that was ok and I just about had the shifting and sloshing thing figured out, but the second week it was in the shop and the only truck available was a 2 stick Mack. I spent a lot of time on the berm trying to get the damn thing back in gear, that second week. I finally got it worked out and preferred that Mack to any other tractor there. I became very good at timing the slosh and carried that knowledge with me into hauling swinging meat and again later hauling hazmat liquids all over the U.S. and Canada. Which just reminded me of some interesting trips to Canada I'll save till next time.

Keep on Keeping on,  Dutch

             The main [5 speed] in the left hand and the auxiliary [2 speed] in the right !

P S, I didn't tell you how to accomplish the shifts because you don't find these anymore. Suffice it to say, there would be a lot less new drivers on the road if they had to start out on one of these. LOL

The good old days !

 Talking about sleep deprivation in the last post reminded me of a job I had in Florida, soon after I moved there, that was really hard on the body, thank GOD it only lasted 2 weeks.

In Tampa there was a company that made tar based shingles [GRAF]' and why I don't know, they got the hot tar from a plant in Mobile, Ala. They usually had a barge that brought it down on the gulf but every year, for two weeks, the barge was down for repairs and Redwing Carriers had the insulated trailers that would keep the tar hot for the trip, so they got the job of moving a barge worth of tar in a short period of time.

 They didn't have the drivers that would do it so it fell upon their one O/O, who I worked for, to do this two week job. "Hap", the O/O, had about 6 tractors and 5 drivers, so we all were tasked with this move.

The tractors were day cab GMC's with no sleeper and the V8 engine [known as the double breasted Yamaha], and a 13 speed trans that was governed for 70 mph. The trip up to Mobile empty was a 10 hour run as this was before I-10 was complete and we ran a lot of back roads. The trip back was 12 hours due to the time lost in Mobile loading and weighing, the loading port was on the south side of I-10 near downtown and the scales was on the north side of town.

Keeping in mind that the tar was loaded at around 110 degrees and would start loosing temp as soon as it was loaded and even though the insulated tank would keep the bulk of the trailer hot, the 2 foot 4 inch pipe at the back, bottom of the tank that was the discharge port, would get a plug in it, that if left to harden to long could not be freed at unloading, so you could sleep going up [across the seats or over the steering wheel] but once you had the load on it was non stop for 12 hours to get back to Tampa ASAP

For this round trip run we were paid a whopping $110, but you could do as many of these as you could stand, while they lasted and "Hap" would always have another unit fueled and ready to go when you got back, so all you had to do was slip out of one and into another, [called slip seating,] and off you go-- don't forget your drugs !

The last 7 day period that I did this for "Hap", I ran 5 trips to Mobile  and a short round up to Jacksonville and back to Tampa for a nice check, at that time, of $600. Thanks to some really good speed [black beauties or west coast turn arounds] I was able to stay awake that whole week on very little sleep but I lost the next 3 days sleeping at home and that was the last time I used speed to that extent, ever !

As they say; "Keep the shinny side up and the dirty side down"   Dutch 

Something you should have in your vehicle

 As a truck driver I had to master the art of keeping awake when my eyes got tired and wanted to close, desperately ! I can tell you of many times that I had dozed of and when I awakened didn't remember traveling the last several miles, very scary !  One thing I learned was to keep my eyes moving, also rolling down the window even when it was cold. A few other things help but if nothing helps, pull of the road and take a short nap of about 30 minutes or the old standby, stop for coffee.

They now have a great little device that I wish I would have had then that fits over your ear and if you nod of it will sound an alarm to wake you again, keeping you from running of the road or into someone else.  Anyone who drives alot or needs to stay awake past normal hours and,   All the truck drivers should have one, with the new log regs some times you can't stop when your body tells you because your logs won't let you !

It's called the "Nap alarm" and I now sell that device on this site for only $15 with free shipping 

Purchase to the right