Repower Woes

T Call existing load. You are now empty and NOT Laden or under dispatch. Switch to PC. Do the swap with the other driver. Switch back to OFF DUTY. Finish your reset. When you log back on duty, enter your arrival and loaded calls, be on your way. Easy and "legal"

 

Not legal. He is still laden untill he's no longer under the trailer, not that laden means anything anyway. No, he's working at the direction of the motor carrier so it's on duty time.

 

I put Legal in quotes. There are gray areas. This is one of them. Swaps and repowers are pretty common when a driver is in the middle of a 10 or 34. It has to be done and there is no reason to trip your clock for a 10 minute process. I doubt that log auditors are itching to ding a driver or company for this type of thing. It is what it is.

 

Splitting hairs. If I’m on a reset, whether at home or on the road, and dispatch needs to move the trailer I have, they can have it. Nothing is stopping you from using pc while on a reset to drop your trailer to do “errands”. Hell, I always reset at home. Not once have I reset on the road. Never have never will with current carrier.

 

I 100% agree!

 

It's not a grey area. It's work for a motor carrier at the direction of the motor carrier. That's in the definition of On Duty per FMCSA. As for if he will get in trouble, well, that wasn't the question. The question was what is legal.

Yes I do agree it would take a really ticked off LEO and a driver admitting to working re-powering while off duty to get a violation, but again the question was if it's legal.

 

Driving 5 mph over the speed limit isn’t legal, either. Do you ever do it?

 

Nothing is illegal, till you get caught.

 

IMHO, HOS is nothing but a nuisance. “They” impose these rules under the guise of safety, which is all well and a good thing. However. If one nit picks right down to the letter of the law, we (collectively) as an industry will get nothing done and hinder commerce. If done properly, that wagon can be dropped, and he can hook up to the other one, and be perfectly safe. It’s not like he drove over hours, drove over another driver in the truck stop parking lot, or spit on a little blonde girl. Just swap wagons and go about your business. Log it when your 34 is over. Or better yet, if he/you know prior to the start of your 34 that this repower will occur, just drop the wagon and park right in front of it real close. When the repower shows up, swap. It’s not that big of a deal. I sure as he11 would not worry about it.

 

It's what can be proven that matters.

If the vehicle has a record of speed and location stored on it that can be used to issue violations after the fact you'd see a lot less speeding.

The OPs company has a record of the trailer being dropped. The times recorded in that record are a "supporting document" that must match the driver's log.

If the driver shoes dropping in the qualcom/dispatch software BEFORE the 34 began, but the company made the decision to repower after that point, the driver has a false log.

If the driver shows dropping AFTER, but the other driver shows picking up during the 34, the driver has a false log.

It used to be hard to go back and prove what time a driver actualy did things, so it didn't matter. We did what needed to be done, made the log LOOK pretty, and no one said anything. Thungs have changed and the lawyers are starting to care about all of these "supporting documents".