What made you most nervous?

First let me see if i can remember that far back. It was the first winter and the thing that sticks out the most was running the mountains with snow and ice on the ground the first time. Places like Cabbage and Donner were not to bad but the first time i went over 4th of July and those up north man was it scary. Then it was the stupid 4 wheelers not giving you room you need on the bad roads during the winter but after the first one the rest were a snap but I always remember the one thing the old timers told me.Son "you can go down every mountain you want to slow but you will only go down one to fast".

 

first of all good luck and take it all with a grain of salt. things out here will get on your nerves but you have to learn to let it go and keep rolling. my biggest concern was and still is on a daily basis is getting to new places. a good cell phone plan is the best advice i can give. don't be afraid to call ahead and get local directions. i wish you the best of luck.

 

Dodging scales with overweight loads always made me nervous. (Also, crossing a state scale when there was no opportunity to check the weight is like a game of Russian roulette.) I hauled fuel oil to the paper mills around Kalamazoo. The boss always wanted a maximum load, so standard procedure was to get off the Interstate and use U.S. 12 through Michigan City and New Buffalo. What made me nervous is the fact that the police must know what we are doing. Many of my overweight loads were loads that could not be corrected if they were overweight. Most of the loads of molten aluminum that I hauled were overweight. Every load of hot metal to the magnesium wheel factory in Howell, MI, was overweight. I would use Grand River Avenue from East Lansing to Howell, passing the restaurant in Fowlerville where the weighmaster from the state scale on I-96 was having lunch. They must have realized what I was doing. A crucible of hot metal looks so out of place in a small town. Every Sunday, we had a load of hot metal to Harley Davidson in Milwaukee. We ran the back roads from the IL/WI state line to the plant, but used the Interstate when returning empty. I knew the routes around so many scales, but in 40 years I never ran the route that takes you past the prison at Jackson, MI. It was common practice in the Michigan/Indiana area to drop down to the toll road to dodge the state scales. Another frequent source of overweight loads was the rail yards. In my day, rail loads were on piggy-back trailers, not inter-modal containers. I remember a load of cedar shingles on a Santa Fe trailer. The shingles were still green and stacked to the roof. That load must have weighed 60,000 lbs. As usual, I knew it was overweight when I backed under it. There was no sense checking the weights at a truck stop. Save the scale fee and dodge the scales. It still makes me nervous.

 

Road construction when they have you own to one or two NARROW lanes with the concrete barriers on one or BOTH sides. When I started driving the ramp in knoxville onto I65 was like this and then there was also areas all the way up the hill. I ran that route 4 or 5 times a week and it scarred the hell out of me every time
You can always tell the rookies, they are the ones using both lanes to drive in when one lane has a barrier on the line

 

i haven't been in knoxville in awhile. is it still this way ? that little stretch is bad how it curves and when it is raining during rush hour traffic it makes it more adventuroues.

 

Working for JB Hunt back in 1993 pulling a fully loaded trailer total vehicle weight right at 80,000 lbs only taking 50 gallons of fuel on at a time to stay legal and coming back east along I70 into Denver, Co.
JB Hunt trucks did not have any jake brakes at the time and it is a LONG downgrade into Denver. Talk about "pucker factor!" I made it all the way down but I had 1 heluva smoke show going on by the time I made it to the bottom. I kept rolling and kept my brakes off allowing air to get in between the brake shoes and drums to cool off the brakes while rolling rather than stopping and waiting for hours for the brakes to cool.

So be careful especially out west in the mountains. Mountain grades can be deceiving and its far better to go down a hill too slow several times safely than go down once too fast.

 

Crossing picket lines is another thing that made me nervous. I was hauling used beer bottles out of a Grand Rapids distributor, three loads per week. Their route drivers stayed on strike for over a year. Eventually, the scabs were allowed to vote whereas many of the union drivers had found other jobs, and place went non-union. On another occasion, I refused to cross a picket line, so the factory sent one of their managers out to get my truck while I waited at a restaurant. It stopped raining after he entered the plant, but he left the wipers running. You can imagine that I was not a happy camper. On another occasion, I was surrounded by roving pickets in Chicago. My local was not on strike, but I stayed nervous for a week after that deal.

 

I was fresh out of school, and started solo with no trainer what-so-ever. Boy I'll tell ya... everything's fine in school... but.... I'm still amazed that the transmission didn't wind up between the trailer tandems the way I rammed that sucker into gear !! It took a while to settle down but sheesh...... it's a good thing that tranny knew what I was up to.