Overdrive Radio

This week on the podcast, we're diving in headfirst to the history of Wisconsin-headquartered owner-operator Mike Nichols, Overdrive's July Trucker of the Month and profiled recently in our Trucker of the Year semi-finalist series by Matt Cole: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15680591/trucker-of-the-month-mike-nichols-knows-limits-hones-strengths As Cole wrote about the...

More, today, from Overdrive Editor Todd Dills's run with Josh Gentry. Gentry’s the son of country music titan Alabama’s founding member and bassist Teddy Gentry. Today, we dive into the history of the band with some of the hands at its headquarters in Ft. Payne, Alabama, around which all three founding members -- Gentry, lead vocalist Randy Owen, and the late guitarist Jeff Cook -- all grew up and...

Thursday, July 18, would be a short day of work for operator Josh Gentry, starting at a leisurely 10 a.m. in Fort Payne, Alabama, outside the Quality Inn in town. There, Gentry met Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills to get rolling, the pair starting the day in Gentry's Chevrolet en route to the site of an old auto dealership in town that, since the mid-1980s, has been the home base of the fan club fo...

"Some guys customize their truck via paint, chrome, lights, and things like that. I customize my truck to make it a more comfortable place to be, a more profitable truck, a more efficient truck." --Owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber May 2024 was a big month for owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber, running with his authority as Oakridge Transport out of a home base in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, now for getting on...

This week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast drops into Overdrive editor Todd Dills' interview with Overdrive June Trucker of the Month Greg Labosky, the man who is master of the machine, in some respects, that is the Amazon loads platform Relay: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15678623/careful-prep-the-name-of-the-game-for-june-trucker-of-the-month Labosky’s oper...

This week's Overdrive Radio episode opens a window onto the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's virtual listening session held last week to discuss the agency’s efforts to potentially improve the safety rating system it uses for determining carriers’ fitness to operate in interstate commerce. Sit in on virtually the entire session, featuring a bevy of views from trucking stakeholders in...

In this podcast, the voice of former FBI counterintelligence assistant director Frank Figliuzzi, in conversation with Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole about the new book, "Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers," a close look at the FBI's long investigation of almost 1,000 murders over decades collected and analyzed in its "Highway Serial Killings" database. As Cole writes in a story that wi...

Walking the giant hallway in the South Wing every year at the Mid-America Trucking Show, you’ll find benches that line the route, where people stop to rest. It's nice and quiet out there in general, compared to the show floor. On one Gary Buchs' walks down the hallways to or from this or that meeting, he happened to glance over and see four gentlemen chatting and smiling. (Those smiles stood out a...

"The power demand, the power that's required to pull a truck down the highway ... the idea is to match the power that's produced by the engine to the power that's required." --Overdrive's May Trucker of the Month Alec Costerus on the bedrock principal behind achieving the best fuel economy Alpha Drivers Transportation two-truck fleet owner and operator Alec Costerus launched the company just a cou...

The Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration on May 20 officially published its notice of proposed rulemaking that, if finalized, would reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I controlled substance to Schedule III: https://www.regulations.gov/document/DEA-2024-0059-0001 The Biden Administration signaled its intent to move forward with such a proposal earlier this month, and the NPRM’s...

As promised two weeks back, here's Part 2 of our talk with May Trucker of the Month Gary Schloo, longtime owner-operator leased to Long Haul Trucking for the last three decades of a five-decade trucking career. Schloo here tells a can't-miss story about how he and his wife and business partner, Terri, met. It' the "classic trucker-and-the-waitress thing" at a late-night diner early in Schloo's tim...

After years of scheduling needed preventive maintenance and sitting out the Roadcheck blitz, last year Mike "Mustang" Crawford hauled through his first Roadcheck in years. As we did after last year's 72-hour inspection blitz, we’ll be riding along again in this Overdrive Radio edition through three days’ worth of scale reports from our friendly on-highway chicken-house correspondent. Regular liste...

"Time is money," as the old saying goes, and as such "time management is money management." That was how the great Red Eye Radio host Eric Harley put it near the beginning of this our last in a series of Partners in Business short podcasts on Overdrive Radio, talks excerpted from a long roundtable conducted at the Mid-America Trucking Show this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khKP2WHZjfg&lis...

This week's Overdrive Radio podcast edition features primarily the voice of Overdrive April Trucker of the Month, owner-operator Gary Schloo. The three-decade-plus owner's headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, leased to Long Haul Trucking out of relatively nearby Albertville. Today, Schloo runs dedicated to a particular customer in Long Haul Trucking’s network and can make a regular round in a day’s...

Today on the podcast, a brief look back into a little bit of Overdrive’s recent history, as you'll hear Canada-headquartered owner-operator Josh Giesbrecht intimate up top. Giesbrecht notes Overdrive gave him his "first big break" on the road to expanded influence around the world for his daily/near-daily series of video blogs he's hosted for nigh on a decade and a half at this point. His "Trucker...

Here find 2024's third mid-week special edition in Overdrive Radio's series of Partners in Business shorts culled from a long owner-operator business-focused talk at the Mid-America Trucking Show last month with Eric Harley of Red Eye Radio. This episode extends from the first couple, expanding on the necessity of close business analysis in near-real-time to keep tabs on costs and profits, the sta...

Last week we heard Part 1 of a long talk with Gill Freightlines small fleet owner Surinder Gill, with four trucks owned and headquartered out of Manteca, California, where Gill’s following in the draft of his owner-operator father’s 60-year trucking legacy. (As you can see in the cover image for this week's Part 2 of that talk, the long legacy is honored on the back of Gill Freightlines’ dry vans....

Manteca, California, Gill Freightlines small fleet owner Surinder Gill's family's trucking lineage traces back through 60 years of OTR work done by his father, Gurmail Singh Gill, over more than one continent. The elder Gill hauled first in his native India, some in the Middle East, and finished out his career in the United States. Surinder Gill had dipped his feet in trucking as a dispatcher by t...

In today’s world, the kind of choosiness with brokers owner-operator Candace Marley practices is an absolute must for many independents. "I don't jump in with just any broker out there," she said. "There's too many scammers out there, too many double brokers, too many frauds." In this edition of Overdrive Radio, Marley details the relationship-building strategy for freight in her Iowa-based one-tr...

Here find 2024's second mid-week special edition in Overdrive Radio's series of Partners in Business shorts culled from a long owner-operator business-focused talk at the Mid-America Trucking Show last month with Eric Harley of Red Eye Radio. This one digs into more of the routine business analysis practice participants in the discussion began to touch on in the last edition, about the importance...

“Like a lot of young boys, I grew up in a farming and trucking environment, and as I stood on the stage a couple of years ago as our company accepted the 2021 Small Fleet Champion of the year award, it hit me that I had hit a pinnacle in my career. Because all I had ever wanted as a young boy was to get my own truck into Overdrive magazine.” --Silver Creek Transportation owner Jason Cowan Yet Silv...

In this special-edition Overdrive Radio short, Red Eye Radio host Eric Harley relays an anecdote from a family relation, an owner-operator who lamented the difficulty coping with the hunger-sticken parts of the feast-or-famine business cycles in trucking. That's most certainly where the business has been for at least the last year -- some would say close to two years at this point in the game -- a...

"We're going to clean up the bad actors that are in our system now." FMCSA registration office director Ken Riddle. Ken Riddle's office handles applications for authority, updates to carrier and other entity data, third-party access to the system, BOC3 filers’ access, and more. In this podcast for April Fool’s Day, we’re not fooling around -- big changes to how carriers interact with the FMCSA’s r...

"As I get older, I like electronic logbooks a lot better than I would have in my 20s. Now that I'm 63, I like that 10 hours off. My work ethic really started to wane when I found out that feed mills are open at noon. You didn't have to be there at 7 o'clock in the morning. You can get there at noon and still unload." --LNL Trucking small fleet owner Larry Limp, reflecting on big changes in truckin...

Independent owner-operator Debbie Desiderato, long hauling with her authority as Walkabout Transport, probably needs no introduction to regular Overdrive readers. Her insight around customer relationships and so much more has featured in Overdrive multiple times through the years, and last year she was one of our Truckers of the Month in the Trucker of the Year program: https://www.overdriveonline...