With this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we’re starting a run back through a little high-quality road listening with Overdrive‘s podcast coproduction with PRX’s Radiotopia network. The Over the Road podcast ran originally between February and June 2020, and the principal eight-episode series was hosted by our own “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer. Therein, we hoped to give mainstream, general-public listeners an intimate acquaintance with the wide array of voices and issues emanating out of and debated within the owner-operator community, also to stir empathy and appreciation with clear portraits of the men and women doing the work of trucking.
And while Over the Road was broadcast for a general listening audience, we did the best we could to accommodate the perspectives and needs, too, of those who, like you, are on the inside of trucking. The end result was less an explainer of trucking to the outsider than an exploration of the business’s present through stories of the past, in a lot of different ways. Mistakes made and redeemed, careers launched and ruined and relaunched, and so much more.
SUBCRIBE TO OVERDRIVE RADIO | Via Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, or search “Overdrive Online” in your listening app of choice.Herein, find a replay of Episode 1 from the 2019 Mid-America Trucking Show, when so many were hopeful for hours of service change (which has since occurred) and the stainless was polished, the driver-to-driver camaraderie had. You might think of it as a trip down memory lane, to a time when four people could turn on the recording equipment and sit for hours together within the mostly stagnant air of a tractor’s cab in lieu of a recording studio, without a whole lot of worry over just who was infecting whom, and with just what.
We hope you enjoy. Take a listen here:
Also in the podcast: A taste of an interview I did with owner-operator Germann Soeth out of Frederick, Maryland, with mostly dump work and principally in a 1998 Kenworth W900. When I caught back up with owner-operator Soeth in October, though, he was showing this 1976 vintage Kenworth cabover. He was, interestingly enough, getting ready to put it into service hauling loads after its long retirement, given a significant breakdown with his 1990s conventional. Find out how he took the rig from scrap yard to working order over the course of a few years here.
