Overdrive Radio

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-yea...

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 vet...

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 ta...

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 techno...

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, m...

"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...

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 a...

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...

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 ye...

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.ov...

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...

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...

... 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-pan...

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 yo...

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...

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. Regula...

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 t...

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 Mak...

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...

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...

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 star...

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 admi...

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, Tex...

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...

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 depar...