ESTES Express (5 Year Review)

Lol you got it all picked out.. we all dream through.

You will be on the board for while. And if you get lucky get a bid with no time it's usually junk cause no one wanted it.

 

It's not wrong to focus on at this point to plan ahead. It takes 5 minutes and 0 amount of brain power for me to look at the Estes website and see what home daily bid runs Estes might have from the Charlotte Terminal. My long term plan is not to run extraboard for the rest of my life but get a dedicated run. It's not unreasonable for me see what types of runs the Charlotte Terminal might have.

Someone on this thread said there's no set time when bids become available. Could become available in 3 months or 1 year, it all depends on the terminals needs. So I don't think it's unreasonable for me to ask this question.

Forget about the Charlotte to Atlanta or any particular run.

For Estes on home daily dedicated linehaul bids that run at night, is it the norm to work 5 days or 6 days per week? Or is the 6th day optional depending on freight and if you want to work a 6th day?

Or do the # of days worked not matters and all that matters is getting as close to your 70 as possible? So for example some runs will get you close to your 70 working 5 days while other runs would get you close to your 70 after 6 days. Or maybe even other runs you could just run on recaps 7 days per week like OTR does?

If anyone could answer it would be much appreciated. Just wondering what the norm work schedule is like for dedicated home daily night time linehaul runs.

 

M-F same bid every night. Saturday work is optional if they have it.

 

And this is the norm for all of LTL, because you are moving freight that the city P&D drivers picked up during the day. Many customers are closed on the weekends, so there isn’t enough freight to move for dedicated runs on Saturday night.

 

You know I really can’t blame you for that, it just sounded like you were trying to prepare yourself for a cushy bid that could maximize your earnings, without also considering the possibility that you could be stuck on the extraboard for a while or end up with a crappy bid that no one else wants.

I do the same thing when considering possible places to transfer within FxF, although I do it with the benefit of dock experience at a major hub. Even when I can pinpoint all of a terminals runs, including weird meets that you wouldn’t think of just from looking at a map, there’s still other variables that can make a run undesirable. Things like late arriving freight pushing the start time back a few hours or maybe perpetually poor weather causing frequent cancellations.

 

There's some drivers that's never seen a bad run. Many senior drivers pick running the road because they don't like dealing with the same run. It just depends. The bigger the terminal the better imo

 

Hey thanks, yeah I kind of figured maybe I was giving off the wrong impression based on yours and Jataran's initial reply. That's why I wrote that reply to you and kind of explained myself. I'm fully prepared to run the board and put in my time and do runs that aren't my #1 choice or whatever. I'm not a complainer and I hope I don't come off as one. But at the same time I need to be looking to where I ultimately want to be too.

You make a very good point about the other variables that I don't know of or aren't thinking of though. And I didn't know LTL had meets that you wouldn't think of. I just assumed the dedicated bids were only from terminal to terminal, I didn't even think about meets outside of the terminals.

 

Got it, this helps, thanks!

 

What’s the Regional OTR position like? Do you get a sleeper as I’m interested in doing OTR again perhaps. What’s the starting CPM. I would be at the Richmond, Va terminal.