Past Chatter

You might recommend the folks at Fast Wrap to your shipper customers, who do the kind of work you see in the picture here, a wrap of a jet engine. They've got mobile crews in more than 60 locations around the country who do the work, and the wrapping material is then recycled by the folks at Fast Wrap themselves. They typically ...

Finley, Ohio-based owner-operator Scott Grenerth, 40, I met in Nashville the day I ran with Jazzy Jordan (she's nearing Statesville, N.C., now -- go go go!). He was in the area headed to a pickup and brought his cycle out (pictured) to ride along as we ran. Turned out he was in the area frequently, and he's lately discovered the great Shelby Bottoms Greenway, ...

A message yesterday from the folks with AsktheTrucker.com about their online radio show, Truth About Trucking, scheduled for 5 p.m. EST this afternoon, detailed the 40 questions the program hopes to answer about CSA 2010 (see below for a full list), delayed from July implementation for carriers to November but no less fraught with complexities and, yes, areas provoking all ...

Sarah Nielson, writer of the "That's What She Said" entertainment/pop culture column at In Utah This Week claimed yesterday that she was, and I quote, a "Turn On for Truckers...", right there in the title of her post about the perceived phenomenon. (Here's Nielson's bio, with picture, at her home site.)  But I imagine the men among you might not take too kindly to the ...

The parallels between space travel and trucking have not gone unremarked-upon in recent times -- you might recall a blog post from a year and more ago I made about an online video game whose concept was cargo hauling in deep space -- and considering the decades-long phenomenon that has been the Star Trek TV series and movies, it was probably only a matter of ...

Lester "Buckshot" Winfree (pictured) has come a long way from his start in trucking in the 1960s. When he launched the Winfree Cattle & Rice company with two trucks late that decade, writes Record Newspapers reporter Robert Hankins in a story accompanying the newspapers' naming of Winfree as Orange County, Texas, "Person of the Year" for 2010, Winfree couldn't have imagined that he would ...

The latest wrinkle in the ongoing debate over potential changes to trucking hours-of-service regulations, for which so many drivers have offered various proposals for injecting flexibility into the system, is the biggest trucking-company organization in the nation's support for codifying split rest in the sleeper berth. "Allowing shorter documented sleeper berth periods  would promote safety and health," ran a portion ...

Though he perhaps needs no introduction, since you may have met him at his booth at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas last year, owner-operator Wayne Dollar (pictured), 54, not only stitches his own quilts, he's been winning awards with three of his uniquely themed creations since he started making them last summer. A trucking-themed quilt, with the moniker "Trucking Around" ...

Since I blogged about "Singin' Sam" Little's campaign launch for the governship of the northernmost U.S. state, Little (pictured, left, with his wife, Denise, and Pat Holt) has been laying the groundwork for the run, part of which included a visit to my home city of Nashville, Tenn., where he met Tennessee's Lieutenant Governor, recorded a new campaign record at Pat Holt's studio and ...

A new sweepstakes put on by Shell Rotella opened today and is asking drivers to share what they feel is the toughest road in America by the end of August. The company's "Road-Tested Challenge," in exchange for operators' stories, offers a chance for drivers to win a VIP NASCAR experience with Richard Childress Racing, along with hundreds of instant prizes, including Shell Gift ...

Trucker/marathoner/blogger Jeff Clark offers a well-thought-out idea for hours-of-service flexibility, giving the stellar, safe drivers out there a new name and the freedom to use their status to run how they please: "Gold card drivers" are "drivers who do not get into accidents," he says. "They don’t get moving violations. They don’t get out-of-service violations, and they do not do ...

Since the New York State protest convoys of November 2008, organized in part by the Mohawk Valley Truckers and Citizens United chapter, the issue of a big plan of truck-route restrictions on state highways in New York has seen growing opposition, with large groups among various industries joining trucking groups in decrying the state's plans to get as many through ...

The Gadsden Times in Alabama published a rich story this past Sunday by correspondent Harry D. Butler about a great American original in Doyle Blackerby, 38-year commercial hauler, born in lower-state Leeds, Ala. His career followed the development of the interstate highway system, beginning just out of the Army in 1950 (where he'd served as a driver) with a small company based ...

"Promising to run with Jazzy is like making a promise to God, but God will forgive you if you break your promise." --Lee Jordan, small fleet owner and father of 17-year-old runner Jasmine "Jazzy" Jordan, currently running across the U.S. to benefit the St. Christopher Truckers Development and Relief Fund And so, for those who might have needed it, below find ...

Every driver knows, at least intuitively, Newton's third law of motion, right? Or is it the first? In any case, it typically runs something like "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction," and is meant to describe momentum and the interaction of objects. The wheels and tires, propelled by the truck's engine, give it momentum enough that the ...

Though the FMCSA's just-published limited-mandate and performance-standards rule for electronic onboard recorders (EOBRs) for logging did next to nothing to open up the market for tools beyond the paper log and expensive devices tethered to the truck's ECM, smartphone applications with similar functionality continue to proliferate. The UDrove app and online storage service, released earlier this year (functional on iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices) enables ...

A development that could mark the end of a long saga (you could make a case that it goes back to the 1980s -- heck, even that it begins prior to the establishment of the Interstate Highway System itself) happened yesterday with the third federal rejection of an application by the state of Pennsylvania for authority to toll Interstate 80 within ...

A scale can be the bane of a truck driver's existence, turning a long-held friendly rural-shipper relationship sour when an inaccurate estimation of cargo weight is found faulty 50 miles down the road at the nearest weigh point. That 50-mile return trip gives a driver a lot of time to think about just who is at fault.   Though I imagine some ...

With a new rule mandating electronic on-board recorders for a boosted number of hours-of-service (HOS) noncompliant carriers, the ongoing HOS listening sessions and FMCSA review of the current hours rule and the expectation among industry parties that an across-the-board EOBR mandate may be in the offing several years down the road, the issue of work time and outside control of that ...

The Discovery Channel's 'American Loggers' series, as you may remember, features in part the Pelletier Logging family, whom I last wrote about here when their friendly business rivals the Crawfords' played one particularly funny battery-powered prank on them of an early March morning. Before that, I happened upon pictures from the Discovery crew's filming at Mack's Macungie, Pa., facility, as they ...

"It's been more than 30 years since Hollywood had White Line Fever," wrote Denver Post Theater Critic John Moore in this article, "'Diesels' Fuels Respect for Truck Drivers,' about the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of their in-house-written new play, "Mama Hated Diesels," that premiered March 25 and is running through early May at the Stage Theater in Denver. And, Moore adds, it's taken an equivalent amount ...