Overdrive Radio

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-pow...

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 hi...

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...

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 n...

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 manda...

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 exte...

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 m...

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 train...

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’...

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...

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....

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...

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 h...

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 earli...

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...

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...

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...

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 dis...

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 als...

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 t...

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...

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 admini...

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 modi...

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 i...

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 t...