Am I responsible for damaged cargo? Securing? Inspecting?

99% of the time they won't. They might try to sell them to you. Write out the receipt yourself if you have to so you can get reimbursed from your company. Might be a good idea to buy a generic receipt book for things like that.

Also, if you can help it, keep the straps in your sleeper lock box and don't leave them in the trailer after a delivery- that's a good way to help warehouse guys make money by re-selling them to other drivers when you forget to check after pulling away from a delivery.

Also, the straps and bars belong to the tractor not the trailer, in general. No sense in acquiring straps and bars only to leave them in trailers when you swap out at a yard or a customer. If your trailer isn't sealed when you drop and hook, then pull your straps out. This advice may differ if your fellow drivers and company have a different policy, i.e. straps belong to the trailer. I only say this because there's nothing worse than showing up to a shipper who requires 20+ straps for a load. It does happen. Then you have to find a nearby truck stop to purchase them and come back or buy them from the shipper, which usually comes with a markup.

 

Doing a truck load one pick/one drop is one thing I had a huge blowout with us cold in pa last week for breaking the seal on the property to see how they loaded it, I do LTL reefer for a direct customer, so the numbers don’t matter, I have a box of extras, told them I needed it high and tight and they put a double, two singles and another double for 6 pallets, (8 spots total) told them either unload it and load it the way I asked or unload it and keep it but I wasn’t loosing money because they didn’t listen to me the first time, the transportation manager finally came out after 3 people didn’t understand why I would break the deal and why I was so irritated. No one else will touch someone else’s freight so it needs to be loaded correctly the first time

 

Where your just starting out. You will need to cut your teeth with a mega carrier. Most loads from a mega carrier will be prescured. Some loads are hands off with drop and hook only.

Tho I had a load of furniture with Western Express. Took it from Pennsylvania to a furniture wharehouse in Uncasville CT there abouts. Going through New York I could hear what sounded like a grand piano falling over. I wasnt allowed to inspect the load at the shipper. All I could do was send a note enroute declaring I heard the load shift and it sounded like a piano from the noise. No one at the yard when I dropped it off. Western told me to drop it off on Sunday and grab an empty. Their headache.