At the launch, test drivers Henry Albert, Kurt Grote, Dick McCorkle and the program’s newest participant, Gina Angsten, received 2010 Cascadia trucks. The trucks feature personalized wrap graphics with themes the drivers requested, a Freightliner Trucks spokesman said.

Gina Angsten has been a driver for nearly 18 years. She works for Wisconsin-based Duplainville Transport, a Quad/Graphics company.

Henry Albert is the owner of Albert Transport Inc., based in Statesville, N.C., and hauls general freight throughout the United States. Albert, who has been a trucker for more than 25 years, was Overdrive magazine’s 2007 Trucker of the Year.

Kurt Grote is leased to John Christner Trucking, based in Sapulpa, Oka. A trucker since 1992, Grote hauls refrigerated products to all 48 states and Canada. He has achieved 1 million miles of safe driving and CABS certification.

Dick McCorkle, who is leased to Perkins Specialized Transportation in Noblesville, Ind., has been a driver for 44 years. For Perkins, McCorkle transports furniture and store fixtures throughout the southwestern United States. McCorkle was named the 2001 Indiana Motor Truck Association’s Driver of the Year and recently won a sportsmanship award in the Indiana truck rodeo championships, in which he has competed for 42 years.

For details on upcoming appearances, podcasts and blogs from the participants, or to directly correspond with the drivers, go to www.SliceofTruckerLife.com.

For once, drivers seem to be part of the regulatory process in a manner meaningful enough that some actually single out the agency under the new administrator for praise, not a necessarily common occurrence among drivers and owner-operators. I had the chance a few weeks back to sit down with 46-year trucking veteran and Perkins Specialized leased owner-operator Dick McCorkle (pictured, and who blogs himself as part of Freightliner’s Slice of Life program here) at the TA in Nashville for a couple hours’ chat before he rode on to deliver north and east in Ohio. McCorkle sees the current hours rules as the best we’ve had, but does think there needs to be some flexibility in the system, particularly for teams. All the same, he says, “I do believe that this new administration is listening to the truck drivers, with the hours of service hearings [then ongoing]. It seems FMCSA is really getting involved with the truck driver, and that’s a good thing” — and, he added, a long time coming. (For more about McCorkle, stay tuned for my “Exit Only” column in the March edition of Truckers News.)

In the Jan. 28 listening session, at a location quite near an Iowa, truckstop, as my colleague Max Kvidera’s excellent story indicated, drivers were making their voices heard. Click here for that report, if you missed it. And as Administrator Ferro made note of in her speech this weekend, you can still file comments on the current hours-of-service rules to make your own voice heard on the issue. Follow this link and click “Submit Comment.”