Independent owner-operator Raiko Graveran, headquartered in Orlando, Florida, has owned this 1995 Freightliner FLD120 for about 15 years now. At the time of the Guilty By Association Truck Show in Joplin, Missouri, last Fall, he'd had it 14.5 years of his 15.5-year trucking career.
He got his start in trucking working for a friend of his father. He'd been working in construction when his dad's friend noted he needed a driver and came to Graveran about getting his CDL. "He said, 'if you get your CDL, I'll get you a job,'" Graveran said. "I got my license on a Thursday, Saturday I get training, and Monday I was working."
Graveran's dad also drove truck. He remembers sitting on his dad's leg at a young age, waiting until he was tall enough to reach the pedals. Once he was, around the age of 14, he started driving the backroads, getting the hang of being behind the wheel. "My trucking learning" he owes to his dad, he said. His father passed away about a year before GBATS last Fall, but "I always got my dad on my head, and I remember what he told me to do."
Through the years, he's been in the habit of jokingly referring to his big truck as his "little truck," hence the rig's name after the repainting of recent years.
Owner-operator Graveran nicknamed the truck
A year after getting his CDL, Graveran bought this Freightliner for just $6,000. "It was in bad shape," he said, with multiple layers of paint peeling off and other mostly cosmetic issues. It "never was the kind of truck to give mechanical issues," however, so Graveran has been working to make it his own throughout his ownership.
He hauls flatbed freight -- no oversize or overweight -- under his own authority as RGT Transport, keeping mostly to lanes between the Southeast and Northeast, out to Iowa and Nebraska, down to Texas and back. In the wintertime, he tries to stay South as much as he can. "Wintertime, you're not going to see this truck up North," he said. It cost him "years of hard work, and I don’t want this truck destroyed by salt."
