Possible Career Change at age 56

I just started at 51 so you are definitely not too old. I drove straight trucks a long while ago and worked another field for 21 years then retired and decided to follow my passion in transportation this year. I did already have a Class A (upgraded my B about 5 years ago) but no experience so was treated as such. I found a few places that will take people with no experience and Class A and provide their training including XPO, Old Dominion, Fedex and Schneider. I went with XPO and finishing my last week of training. You are home daily and off weekends but at my terminal you are either day time City P&D (pick up and delivering) dropping off freight and picking up freight at clients location or most new hires start at Night time Line Haul where you are pulling doubles to other XPO hubs and loading/unloading trailers at dock. There drivers here who started with no license as dock workers and were trained like stated in the listing.

 

No, don't know much about them. A few drivers on this forum went to work there and no negative feedback.

 

You are definitely in a good location for good CDL jobs. I’m fairly new to trucking and am at XPO in Oregon. Excellent position/company in my experience. If you can put yourself through CDL school, you’ll have the trucking world at your fingertips. If not, you’ve still some excellent options. XPO in Clackamas has a training program for folks w/o a CDL. You gotta wanna work though. LTL isn’t for steering-wheel holders. And I’m not dumping on folks that wanna do that, not at all, to each their own. I’m just saying.

 

I did a phone interview with them. Sounded pretty good. The pay was great, especially for driving a tanker-wagon and not a tractor-trailer. I think it was swing-shift or swing/graveyard, filling school bus tanks mostly, and delivering lube.

 

Unload by hand

 

@ProspectiveDriver56
I currently work as a retail clerk for a major retail/pharmacy chain. One of my jobs is helping to unload trucks. The truck drivers must set up rollers and unload each piece by hand, sending them down the rollers. Quite often, the unloading process can last quite a few hours. These truck drivers go from one store to another doing this all day long.

 

I honestly don't know.

God bless every American and their families! God bless the U.S.A.!

The absolute sheer driving force of our national economy - without truck drivers, our entire national economy would come to an absolute standstill - if not outright be dead.

Over the mountains, through the woods, into the valleys, coast to coast, from sea to shining sea - truck drivers can and do go anywhere and everywhere, every day, all year round.

 

Thats how they did it at Kmart 25 years ago. Forget all that noise.

I went to Dollar General today and noticed a CR England driver unloading via liftgate. F that noise too. Why not do LTL P&D and get paid better and be home every night for the same work? If I was driving OTR, especially for $0.30-0.40/mile, there’s no way I’d do any work beyond driving.