Toward reinvigorating camaraderie among haulers: Introducing road chaplain, owner-op and Overdrive Extra blogger Clifford Petersen

user-gravatar Headshot
Clifford-Petersen-2018-08-06-14-09

I was looking for him in the wrong place when I walked into the truck lot this morning at the Lebanon, Tenn., Pilot stop on exit 283 on I-40. Turns out, as you can see below, Christenson Transportation leased dry van hauler Clifford Petersen was parked in the car lot, bobtail, given he’d dropped his trailer at Christenson’s local terminal and, as he put it, of course didn’t want to take up a spot from a combo unit in the main lot when he arrived the night prior for his break.

(The bobtail spaces at the truck stop were taken up by RVs and four-wheelers when he’d arrived, too, so here he sat.)(The bobtail spaces at the truck stop were taken up by RVs and four-wheelers when he’d arrived, too, so here he sat.)

We had coffee and talked over Petersen’s recent-years history in trucking, including his current TRAC lease entered into with Christenson with a four-year term and ending balloon of $30,000 or so for the Paccar-engine-powered 2018 KW T680 he’s in. With 30,000 lbs. in a dry box recently he hit an impressive 10-plus in the mpg department, which combined with plenty miles under his miles-pay contract with the carrier has him happy with income about a year in, despite some bad-luck hiccups he talked about in our conversation, which you can hear in this the latest edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast:

Apologies for getting a bit off the late-in-the-week schedule for the weekly podcast — last week, regular readers may have noticed, was my annual R&R with the family (hats off to highway haulers we followed back and forth through middle Tennessee, into Kentucky and Illinois and the St. Louis area in Missouri).

Back at it, and glad to be so, this week.

Overdrive Extra blog contributors Petersen, Paul Marhoefer and Editorial Director Max Heine well-minded the blogroll store, so to speak, here in my absence. Here’s hoping you caught their stuff in the last week, and ongoing.

As regards Petersen, particularly, expect more to come following his piece about “Chicken Little” and the driver-shortage notion last week. Among central concerns for him, as he also notes in the podcast, is in joining wholeheartedly any attempts at renewing that sense of camaraderie among the community of truckers often seen as in relatively shorter supply in today’s world. In the words of trucker Jim Bardsley, featured in a past edition of this podcast, maybe such efforts might spur trucking’s old “brotherhood virus,” so to speak, to come alive and spread.

Partner Insights
Information to advance your business from industry suppliers

Petersen, who serves as a Road Chaplain with the Channel 21 Ministries organization among other things, hopes his efforts can be a part.

Find more from him among the group of contributors to the Overdrive Extra blog at this link.