2,000,000 Miler: Long Haul Trucker

By Pete (Pierre) Major

Trucking is one part of a multifaceted logistical industry that is global in reach and integrated to the extent few can imagine.
Air freight, container ships, rail, they all play a part in working together in ways few people appreciate and for the most part are unaware of.
The overarching taskmaster for all these carriers is the clock which is forever pushing the limits of their capabilities.
Disruptions caused by war,weather, broken treaties, pandemics, you name it - any one of these can cause everyone's best laid time schedule to crumble.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667885117

Book preview

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2,000,000 Miler: Long Haul Trucker

© 2023, Pete (Pierre) Major.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66788-510-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66788-511-7

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: Voyagers: North America’s Original Long-Haul Truckers

Chapter 2: Trucking 101 Glossary

Chapter 3: 45166

Chapter 4: Tiny Home & Office

Chapter 5: Dedicated Runs

Chapter 6: One-Offs

Chapter 7: Dinner is Served

Chapter 8: Dunnage

Chapter 9: Red Tape, Yellow Tape, Invisible Tape

Chapter 10: Hitch a Virtual Ride: Detroit, MI to Laredo, TX

Chapter 11: Art Galleries & Museums

Chapter 12: Winter

Chapter 13: Tornado

Chapter 14: Bridges

Chapter 15: Mountains

Chapter 16: Kona

Chapter 17: Pikes Peak or Bust! Wanna Race?

Chapter 18: Lock It Up!

Chapter 19: CB’s, Maps and GPS

Epilogue

Credits

Appendix / Notes

Note to the reader

Foreword

I was going blind. No more denying it. The lava lamp of blackness in my lower left eye had been creeping steadily higher to the point where I needed to get to my eye doctor ASAP. By the time I came to this decision I was already three weeks on the road and with my truck in Kansas. My eye doctor was in Detroit, more than a hard day’s driving time away.

Prior to heading out of town I could have avoided all this by paying attention to the early symptoms before leaving town. All those symptoms pointed to a detached retina. Sitting in the examination room with my eye doctor peering into my eye while dictating a litany of ominous sounding medical lingo into his recorder didn’t sound encouraging. A seriously detached retina it was.

The prognosis was gloomy, he led me to a dark room and instructed me to sit quietly without moving while he went to arrange with a specialist for an emergency operation. Odds were 50/50 as to whether he can save my sight. Laser surgery or Scalera buckle (basically a zip-tie around your eyeball) were the choices presented to me by the surgeon. After five minutes back and forth, I chose the Scalera buckle, primarily because laying facedown for three weeks while recovering sounded like an impossible task.

If the reader goes no further than this in the book, listen up! If you see flashing in your eye, blurriness of vision, get your butt over to your eye doctor immediately. Some pain, some discomfort but my recovery went well and aside from difficulty reading for extended periods (especially on computer screens), I was up and running and back to work within a few months and good for another 12 years.

You might not want to take my medical advice but having two million miles plus on the open road as a long-haul trucker, some of my tips in that area are worth noting. My book is less a driver’s instruction manual but more a snapshot of the good, bad and some ugly one can expect to encounter crisscrossing the U.S. and Canada.

Having been in and out of the trucking industry since the mid seventies, work has been a mixed bag for me, navigating an uneven and rocky road with economic ups and downs complicated by various relationships and family dynamics.

If you want to know more read on.

Chapter 1:

Voyagers:

North America’s Original

Long-Haul Truckers

My homeboy—Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac — beat me to it by about 260 years. Having set out from Montreal, Canada, leading a fleet of canoes, he landed in what is now Detroit. There he established a fort and laid claim to it for France back in 1701. Many of the streets in downtown Detroit still bear French names and reflect the way in which the local real estate was parceled out to Cadillac’s buddies.

Border crossings as we know them today were nonexistent and it would be a while before Great Britain, France, Spain and the British Colonies, not to mention numerous indigenous tribes, would form borders as we now know them.

A statue of Cadillac in downtown Detroit is a reminder of those days. A bigger legacy is the link between his name and the General Motors’ flagship Cadillac car brand. As a naturalized American citizen born in Montreal, Canada, and having spent a large part of my life roaming the world and later with CFI—Contract Freighters Inc.—crisscrossing every state in the lower 48 plus most provinces in Canada, the connection to Cadillac isn’t lost on me.

Today’s recreational canoe bears only a slight resemblance to the industrial size birchbark canoes that plied the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. These were designed for maximum capacity, capable of carrying three tons of cargo and were manned by a crew of 12. Voyagers, the truckers of the time, hauled fur pelts from throughout the region, many of which were shipped to Europe. It was a hard life for a voyager with heavy loads to portage around the treacherous river rapids. There were no Google maps or Weather Channel to assist them on their destinations.

With November on the horizon as I write this, the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot is a sober reminder of the hardships the voyagers faced in vessels much more fragile than the ore-carrying freighters of modern times. Much like today they had to keep to tight schedules dictated by the seasons and linking with the sailing ships that crossed the Atlantic to Europe.

My modern day canoe was a 70-plus foot tractor-trailer, and many of my journeys took me along those same fur trading routes and beyond. Interstates and secondary roads replaced the lakes and rivers used by the voyagers.

During most of my time with CFI, the company remained stable. They were then bought out by Conway Trucking, who after I retired, sold it to XPO Logistics. Finally, in a curious twist of circumstances TransForce, Inc, (the largest Canadian trucking outfit) based out of guess where? Yep! Montreal, Canada, bought CFI from XPO, and let them return to their very profitable way of operating as a truckload carrier.

A well-run truckload company such as CFI has always been a cash cow. The smart corporate interests returned it to its profitable self. But it doesn’t end there. Heartland Express, a large truckload carrier based out of Iowa just bought CFI for more than $500 million in the course of my writing this book. A large fish being gobbled up by an even larger fish, a never-ending theme in the world of big business where everything is for sale.

I arrived in Detroit with my family in the 1960s—260 years after Cadillac made his appearance. I left Detroit for a number of years and later returned, starting work for CFI in 1993 based at their Detroit, (Taylor) headquarters with the intention of staying for maybe a couple of years. That morphed into about 20 years and by the time I left CFI, I racked up almost two million miles as an OTR driver with CFI alone. My average year was something like 100,000 to 115,000 miles. Throughout my career with CFI, I was a solo driver, as opposed to running team where there are two drivers per truck taking alternating turns at the wheel.

To make a living in this business I would aim for a weekly goal of about 3,000 miles, plus or minus. When I started with CFI the company required us to remain on the road for a minimum of two weeks at a time, however, being out on the road for a month at a time was more the norm for me.

Truckload Companies: An Overview

CFI’s average dispatch was about 1,000 miles and took us throughout the lower 48 States and Canada. Our company also had accounts that extended into Mexico and Central America. However, our drivers didn’t go into Mexico; our trailers would be handed over to Mexican trucking companies that CFI partnered with to deliver and unload or load them there. As with most truckload companies, CFI maintained little to nothing in the way of warehouses. Our thousands of trailers scattered throughout Canada and the U.S. along with Mexico and Central America consisted of what was in effect a virtual floating warehouse available to our many accounts as needed.

CFI’s main terminal was in Joplin, MO. It was the largest of our terminals housing complete tractor and trailer repair shops, inspection bays, a tire shop, wash bays, a body shop and administrative building with central dispatch along with acres of concrete parking for all the trailers coming and going. As Joplin is situated near the central part of the U.S. it was an ideal location for an operation such as ours.

Most truckload companies operate under the forced dispatch system, meaning drivers must accept (with few exceptions) the dispatch given them wherever the destination may be. In other words, drivers cannot cherry pick their loads in the hopes of getting a load with more miles or to an area of the country of their choosing.

Once CFI booked a load from one of its clients they committed to certain pickup and delivery times that followed extremely tight schedules known in the transportation industry as JIT (just in time) shipping. Failure to meet those tight schedules could result in big financial penalties for CFI and maybe a loss of business for the client. Similarly, a driver could be penalized for arriving too early.

Why? Some smaller companies have limited space at their loading docks and next to nothing in the surrounding areas to handle traffic. In short, they don’t want you around plugging up the streets. Arrive early and you’ll get reprimanded. Drivers who balked or declined load assignments usually found themselves looking for another job. With this and other hardships, it’s no wonder the long haul trucking business has an average annual turnover of 100%!

By the conclusion of my career with CFI and despite the odds against me I managed to have only two minor accidents (damage to parked cars), two overweight tickets, a couple logbook infractions and one speeding ticket. That’s right! Just one speeding ticket. Impressive as my record is, CFI has drivers that equal or exceed mine in miles accumulated. We’ve had drivers in the three-to-four-million-mile range and at least one I know of with five million miles, all with CFI!

All CFI drivers who get these awards have accumulated all their miles while driving with CFI and didn’t bring miles over from other companies to be added to whatever miles they produced at CFI.

The majority of our trucks at the time were Kenworth tractors with 10-speed transmission and later some automatics. Most had Cummins engines but there was a sprinkling of Caterpillar and Detroit Diesels. Our early models of Kenworth tractors were T-600s conventional with the distinct anteater look. Later there were the larger more powerful T-2000s now moved on to later designs. Our trailers were all 53 feet in length and made by various names in the trailer manufacturing industry such as Trailmobile, Great Dane, Wabash, Utility and others.

As a truckload carrier, the vast majority of our freight was comprised of one commodity at a time, i.e., auto freight and parts of every description, beer loads, batteries, paints, industrial commodities, pharmaceuticals, mining, ores, copper, lead, large reels of cables, large rolls of paper, etc. All were shipped to one destination as opposed to multiple shipments going to multiple locations. This latter type of trucking operation was handled by trucking outfits that conduct LTL (less than truckload) business.

Thankfully most of our deliveries were of the no touch freight kind, meaning we weren’t required to unload it by hand. If you ever had to unload 30 to 40 thousand pounds by hand in the course of a day you know what I mean. The freight in a fully loaded trailer alone can be up to 45,000 pounds. In some instances where we had to unload the trailer ourselves, we could hire day laborers to take care of the unloading for us and we would be reimbursed.

Want to know more? Read on.

Chapter 2:

Trucking 101

Glossary

Air lines – Coiled flex tubing lines that conduct the air from the air compressor to the braking system, air suspension (air bags) and air ride seats. The coupling system to lock the lines from the tractor to the trailer are called the glad hands. One colored line is blue, the other red which is called the emergency line. The blue line is the active one and should it break or come disconnected the emergency line takes over. An air gauge on the dashboard monitors the air pressure and reserves.

Air compressor – The unit that generates and provides air to the needed air system used by the tractor-trailer. It is up by the engine compartment and pumps compressed air that is stored in air tanks which are positioned on the frame of the tractor and the trailer.

Glad hands – A coupling mechanism that provides the connection point between air lines from the tractor to the trailer.

O-rings – A round rubber sealing ring that fits into the mating portions of the glad hands. They are