Overdrive Radio

Owner-operator Brian Bucenell's 2002 Peterbilt 379 was among the 100 or so trucks that participated in the "slow roll" event in Indianapolis last week. Bucenell's also helping put on a Virginia "slow roll" event tomorrow, March 2, with a gathering point in Doswell, Va. (The group plans to roll out from the Doswell truck stop on I-95 at 11 a.m.) Slow roll events follow in Ohio on March 8 and in the...

And, as the picture shows, more from Long Haul Paul Marhoefer from the stage at the Key Palace Theater in Redkey, Ind., this past Feb. 2. Otherwise, this edition of Overdrive Radio takes aim at combating increasingly proliferating online scams. High degrees of situational awareness are your best tools, says Safr.me consultant and author Robert Siciliano, who speaks here. Some such cases have seen...

There are a multiplicity of smartphone apps out there for leased owner-ops from their leasing carriers, but we hadn’t seen anything quite like the "Ultimate Advantage" app from expediter Load One before we first wrote about it this time last year. In the sort of emergency-freight service that is the expedited trucking business, having information about where to be to best set yourself up for the n...

This edition of Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor James Jaillet's conversation with Northeastern University academic Alex Scott, who with colleagues at Michigan State and the University of Arkansas completed a recent study around potential safety-sensitive impacts of the electronic-logging-device mandate. The upshot, which you know if you saw the headlines, is that a comparative ana...

This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features a talk with small fleet owner Dave Marti of Forrest, Ill. He's got six power units, including his own, leased to Transport Services of Sullivan, Ill., hauling fuel in the region around his home base, delivering in liquid-bulk hazmat tanks to fueling stations that see an uptick in volume this time of year. His is one of not many trucking n...

Today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features a long talk on subject matter in the headline, and more, with owner-operator Steve Bixler of Valley View, Pa., the relatively recently former OOIDA board member and hauler of sand to natural gas drilling and fracking operations in his region. He resigned from OOIDA board in 2017 amid business issues at that time, and today, he’s working with...

This edition of Overdrive Radio follows up with Andre Jackson, owner-operator with a business partner of the one-year-old Midnight Xpress small fleet, based down in Mississippi (partner in the business, owner-op Donte Ogletree, is based in Atlanta). Regular listeners will remember late last summer when Jackson was the principal guest on the podcast telling the story of his comeback from multiple h...

A talk here with the owner of and a contractor to Southern California-based Angus Transportation, a now three-truck business owned and operated by Jimmy Nevarez. Leased owner-operator Darril Lightburn is in a percentage-type comensation arrangement there as an independent contractor, and Overdrive spoke with he and Nevarez both given latter’s past experience hauling rail intermodal containers in t...

Take a look back on 2018 and, viewed through the lenses of time and the myriad of conversations and voices heard on the Overdrive Radio podcast, 2018 might well be dubbed the year of ticky-tack and more serious issues related to the implementation of, what else, the electronic logging device mandate. Owner-operators’ adjustments in light of that rule, which started being enforced in a significant...

This edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features Overdrive Senior Editor James Jaillet, who penned the piece we suspect many of you noticed in the last couple weeks at OverdriveOnline.com, or in the December print magazine, about new enforcement heat on emissions regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to post-2006 heavy duty diesel engines. The story was spurred on...

Owner-operator Scott Hampton pulled hoppers before transitioning to the operation he's in today, which he describes as his "flower gravy train" doing multi-drop distribution runs for shipper Dallas Johnson Greenhouse in Council Bluffs, Iowa, south to a variety of stores this time of year. When we talked for what is the latest edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast a couple weeks back, he'd hopped...

Beware what you sign, owner-operators, when getting set up with a broker. So notes Transportation attorney Hank Seaton, in conversation about the curious case of a Florida-based three-truck fleet who reached out about what it saw as the strange treatment of two loads her company hauled earlier this year for Bennett International Group, both as yet unpaid. Seaton describes brokers' "right to offset...

In this edition Overdrive Radio, St. Louis mother Sarah Welsh details how the trucking community, particularly a variety of owner-operators among it, has helped foster her 12-year-old son Robbie's passion for so many things trucking -- and particularly: "meeting drivers to talk about their trucks." A young man of my own heart, as it were. Also in the podcast, we’ll hear from a man I bet young Robb...

So just how did Daniel and Phyllis Snow's 1996 Freightliner Classic XL get to be called 'The Goose'? Here in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, the independent owner-operators tell that story, which involves their son's 1999 Classic 'The Duck', too. Also: A bit of stumping for the importance of small business in trucking from Ray Martinez, part of his address at the annual meeting of the...

"The winds of change" are afoot at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, said FMCSA chief Ray Martinez in his opening keynote at the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies November 1. The three-day event is ongoing in Nashville, Tenn. Leadership at the Department of Transportation on up to the President of the United States, he added, "wants us to work...

In this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we take a run through Hurricane Michael’s devastating effects on the Florida panhandle north through clear to Albany, Ga., where 100-mile-per-hour-plus winds persisted in the fast-moving storm well after landfall. With all the devastation, for some owner-operators new opportunities arise, as regular listeners and readers of Overdrive well know...

Just a couple weeks out from Veteran’s Day November 11, we walked through recent additions to BlackOut Freightliner veterans-tribute and memorial truck and owner Chuck Timbrook’s formalizing of the operation as a nonprofit organization, some new involvement in NASCAR and other racing events for Timbrook, and more relating to the rig two years after Timbrook's heart surgery sidelined him from comme...

In this Overdrive Radio edition we’re talking truck parking with some of the insights on parking advocacy and brass-tacks on-highway planning delivered as part of the parking panel we hosted at the Great American Trucking Show in August. You probably saw Overdrive’s James Jaillet’s report on the panel in September, but this bit of audio gives you a window into the discussion, valuable for anyone I...

A few voices from participants in "That's a big 10-4 on D.C." last week from the National Mall. Owner-op Doug Hasner explains the rationale behind his own involvement, and updates the status of the charges filed against him after he was tased by police in April during a Constitution Ave. demonstration (all charges dropped). Todd Campbell of Ohio argues that a qualified positive for truckers in the...

Since being featured on the cover of Overdrive in February of 2013, Bolton, Mississippi-based owner-operator Andre Jackson in the last year has completed a more than five-year journey through adversity to success in business ownership with a business partner, Donte Ogletree of Atlanta, the two operating under their own authority with two power units as Midnight Express. In this edition of the Over...

This edition of Overdrive Radio rounds up three distinct parts of the Partners in Business seminars held last month at the Great American Trucking Show, with presentations by ATBS President Todd Amen, radio host and former small fleet owner-operator Kevin Rutherford, and Richard DeForest, also with ATBS and a longtime PIB presenter.  1) Amen begins with a quick take on current conditions in trucki...

This Overdrive Radio edition is a triptych of sorts: this edition is threefold – 1. Owner-operator Allen Kelly of Pennsylvania runs through some of the particulars on the “That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C.” event coming up, when else, on October 4 in Fredericksburg, Va., and Washington, D.C. 2: Stevens Transport driver and RoadTestedLiving.com proprietor Tom Kyrk run through his in-cab cooking demos and a...

A run through Bill Weaver’s new all-truckin' 'Burnin’ the Old School Down' record, recorded in part with members of a band called the Stone Creek Four out of Kingsport, Tennessee, with whom Weaver performed three nights running at the Great American Trucking Show a couple weeks back now in Dallas. That's where we talked with him for this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, burning through a fe...

From FMCSA's Aug. 25-held public listening session on hours of service reforms: Owner-operators take to the mic to make their recommendations and anecdotes pertaining to the agency's review of hours of service regs.

As it happened on Friday, Aug. 24, of the 2018 Great American Trucking Show in Dallas, this week's Overdrive Radio podcast takes you through the music and people who were a part of the fifth annual Overdrive/Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search: emcee Tony Justice, opener and past talent search competitor Paul Marhoefer, and this year's entrants Benford "B.J." Williams, James Nelson, and winner Man...