Overdrive Radio

If you’ve ever had the experience of a starter going bad at ever-decreasing intervals — the first one on the truck from the factory lasted 500,000 miles, the next one 200,000, etc. — you could be experiencing a phenomenon noted by Danial Mustafa, TA Truck Centers’ Director of Technical Services. Absent the right diagnostic equipment to troubleshoot conditions all along the loaded-up electrical and...

In the relative calm before a storm that walloped Lexington, Ky., as the first day of the Expedite Expo let out last month, Overdrive Radio sat down with the two finalists and ultimately runners-up for the Expediter of the Year award: AD Transportation driver Nancy Hudson and cargo van small fleet owner and Class 8 straight truck owner-operator Eric Escobar. The two shared insights from decades in...

This Overdrive Radio edition checks in with a more complete introduction to Clifford Petersen’s leased operation with Christenson transportation, headquartered near Springfield, Mo., with more than 100 power units hauling mostly dry freight, Petersen notes. For regular Overdrive readers, Petersen probably needs no introduction, as he’s written several blog posts in recent times in which he draws o...

Cargo van owner-operator Tim Paxton, leased to Arkansas-based Barrett Directline, is the 2018 Expediter of the Year, and in this edition of Overdrive Radio, recorded prior to the announcement of his award July 21 at Expedite Expo, Paxton lays out a variety challenges faced by his and others' small-vehicle trucking operations. He's got an eye on the successes, too, though, from a healthy income for...

As of press time, more than a month after the One20 company ceased operations entirely, and nearly three months after the owner of an affiliated business, the single-truck One20 Trucking, resigned his position as head of One20 Inc., owner-operators Lee and Lisa Schmitt, contracted to One20 Trucking, were still owed money for loads booked and hauled for the company, they say. The former One20 Truck...

Hose was put out of service with a false-log violation in Missouri early in June, as his One20 ELD was giving him problems en route a couple weeks prior to the company stopping support for the device on June 18. For Hose, his run with that particular ELD is one marred by inexplicable automatic duty-status changes and other malfunctions he can’t explain to this day, His story is one of difficulty,...

Pam Young's thoughts on produce rates post-ELD mandate and how the Food Safety Modernization Act's new sanitary transportation requirements led her to develop a new automated reefer washout effort lead this podcast discussion with the produce broker, following up on parts of the discussion in last week's Overdrive Radio edition.

A brief run through the mailbag with disheartened haulers affected by the shuttering of the One20 F-ELD just a couple months beyond the April 1 out-of-service enforcement date for the ELD mandate. And a more extensive talk with produce broker Pam Young, well-learned in old-school ways, preferring the personal touch to digital standoffishness when it comes to building relationships with carriers. A...

Ahead of her Rotella SuperRigs performance in Raphine, Va., June 16, Australia singer-songwriter Jayne Denham sat down with us in Nashville to talk in-roads with the U.S. trucking community, her new "Calamity" record, the "Lights on the Hill" memorial for fallen haulers taken before their time in Australia and more. Also: Bonus update from the scene with the custom rigs on offer at White's Travel...

This edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast picks up in part from where we left off in the intro last week with a note from Carolyn Carroll on the utility she finds in paid parking reservations. You can find our report, “ELDs up the ante on parking”, on the growth in those (reviled by many but appreciated by many as well) and much more besides at OverdriveOnline.com. In our talk Carroll lays out h...

More tales of private parking enforcement via booting and towing result in what James Smith of Jackson, Ga., calls a "very expensive Kentucky Fried Chicken meal." Further perspective on the utility of paid-reserved parking, the demise of truck-dedicated parking at the Walmart in Aurora, Colo., and some predictions from panelists at last week's Truckstop.com's user conference in Dallas on just how...

The first in what will ultimately be two podcasts sharing portions of a trucking-insights panel held at Truckstop.com’s third Connected user conference, held earlier this week in Dallas. Insights on rates growth post-ELD mandate, economic conditions and just when we might look out for a downturn, automation in trucking and brokerage and much more were on offer from Tucker Company Worldwide broker...

Independent owner-operator W. Joel Baker's W. recent blog post about business opportunity, rate improvement and other conditions since the ELD mandate was the jumping-off point for this edition of Overdrive Radio. Baker trucks in an ELD-exempt 1999 International, and he’s had difficulty keeping up with is customers’ demand for RV delivery lately, given the double whammy of an improved economy and...

Owner-op Jim Bardsley believes about the best thing that could happen to trucking, from perspectives of safety and so much more, is the spread of the brotherhood virus, a return of some semblance of honor to the hiring practices, follow-on training protocols and more in place today at carriers large and small. Bardsley, in this edition of Overdrive Radio, reflects on his three-decade-plus career a...

A run through the mailbag with contrarians and true believers around the question of whether the ELD mandate has exacerbated parking issues around the nation. And: A little detail on an hours-enforcement-with-ELD situation that begged for officer leniency when none was to be had.

No sooner did we receive word of an amendment proposed to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that seemed to be designed to grease the skids for some sort of regulatory hours of service action by the FMCSA than we heard the opposite, at least according to an aide to the amendment's sponsor, Arkansas Rep. Rick Crawford. Overdrive News Editor James Jaillet, TruckersNews.com Edit...

The last of three separate seminars at the Mid-America Trucking Show conducted by Sirius XM radio host and owner-op coach/consultant Kevin Rutherford was billed to focus on surviving the first year under your own authority as an owner-op. Rutherford in recent years has pushed the idea that owner-operators with authority pursuing relationships with brokers to move freight could make for the most ef...

When they booked a load going from one Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas to another in Edwardsville, Ill., Gary and Ondena Caraway had some indications all would not be well for the couple's van trailer on the other end. Problem is, they missed the fine-print indication on the load listing that 12-48 hours would be required for unload. When that 48 hours turned into a week.... Well, let's just say the...

This talk with owner-operator and OOIDA board member Tilden Curl of Washington State touches on the option available to (mostly large) motor carriers to self-insure, whose implications "run deep," Curl says, from issues of training and substandard pay to safety and more. Curl also weighs on the central theme in this week following all the hours of service/ELD angst percolating among haulers of all...

It was a knock-out performance by 2016 Trucker Talent Search winning trucker-singer-songwriter Jason Lee Wilson of Maryville, Tenn., including his infamous “Truck Stop Betty” in homage to a waitress at the old Monteagle Truck Stop, and a track those of you who’ve been dealing with those persnickety ELDs might relate to. This performance occurred at the Progressive Commercial booth in the North Win...

With a new record out from Laughing Hyena records and available at many truck stops around the nation, Paul Marhoefer started the week of the 2018 Mid-America Trucking Show in Nashville, Tenn., where Overdrive Radio caught up with him for an impromptu run through several of his tracks at the Fiddler's Inn. "Long Haul Paul" also talks a bit here through his approach to a new irregular series he's p...

Todd Amen of ATBS is increasingly bullish on the prospects of income improvements for owner-operators in 2018 as capacity pressures mount and rates rise for independents and leased reefer, dry and flatbed haulers paid on a percentage of the load. Expect, he says, many of those paid per-mile to see pay-rate hikes this year, too. These are just a couple 2018 and forward predictions he makes in this...

The second half of Overdrive Radio's Todd Dills' talk with Leander Richmond, Eagle Express small fleet owner, about brokers' and truckers' often conflicting expectations, his own thoughts on the hours of service regulations now that ELDs are here, business conditions, an experience with double brokering and more. That follows a bit of a further mailbag round of voices on the potential for change i...

Communication is important, for sure, but Leander Richmond of eight-truck small fleet Eagle Express, headquartered in Michigan, has uncovered no small amount of frustration in the very fiber of his being with increasingly pushy freight middlemen when it comes to proof of delivery. As you’ll hear here at the beginning of our talk, some go so far as to make it a contract stipulation that the carrier...

Herein a bevy of reader responses to OOIDA’s petition to FMCSA to add a three-hour pause button option to the 14-hour on-duty clock in the hours of service rule. Several readers viewed it as the kind of common-sense option that could add some flexibility to the rule to alleviate new stresses incurred as a result of the mandate to utilize electronic logging devices. The large majority of reader res...