Tarping

Looks like the place in Newington CT. They used to help get my tarps up on top of those trailers, still a pain in the ###/
And i used to bring them 15/20 miles away, which made it all the more frustrating as tarping and untarping took quite a bit longer than trucking them

 

90% of where I load have harping station's.If they dont it's a no tarp load.

 

I worked for ploof when they had 1 piece tarps that weighed 240..260 and 280 lbs.That was fun.

 

Yes.And a machine.

 

Even in the mid ‘80’s Slack Transport and Laidlaw up here were still using one piece tarps on 45’ and 48’s for drywall and boards. The first loads I tarped as a kid were with square 1piece canvas tarps that were tied on with ropes. Thankfully by the time I started driving we had 3 and 4 piece sets with flaps and d-rings and all that fancy stuff, but they were still canvas and pretty heavy.

 

Not directly related to flatbedding, but one of my jobs hauling waste to a landfill involved tarping with those one piece roll-out canvas tarps. This was before they figured out how to put the tarp rollers and bars on the trucks to automate it, so we had to manually roll out, walking on top of the garbage, those heavy stinky tarps to drop over the sides and secure with the ropes. Stunk a lot and showered a lot in those days.
Hard to believe kids complain about tarping today, isn't it?

 

Rolling tarps out over 40yd roll-off bins full of grocery store waste and other unspeakable things was a part of my world at one time. Tarping lumber was far from the worst thing that could happen to me after that. I did a lot of my learning on old gas engine roll-offs and luggers before they’d let me at the big trucks. Put in my time on the dozers and scrapers in the landfill as a kid too.

 

Yeah, I've done the roll-offs, but we were hauling the 53 foot Michigan sleds 8 axles to the landfills... walk offs unloading, or dump. Fun times.

 

The rest of the world runs curtain sides, but here we are still messing around with tarps, i know we have curtain sides and conestogas but some shippers are afraid of them,