FedEx Ground Linehaul with JohnBoy

Haven’t seen one of their trucks in over a year.

 

Last night getting ready to leave Humboldt. I’ve had a rider with me all week training him. He’ll be a local driver. There’s no difference between local or Linehaul, the system is all the same.

 

Volunteered to do an Olive Branch turn tonight. Bringing a set of empties there and grabbing a loaded set back.

 

As I see it, the contractor has the seniority then his drivers are set up according to his seniority. The difference with my contractor is most of his trucks are day cab doing your type of work. His assigned hub, Humboldt, is all his. No one but him takes care of all the local work within a 50 mile radius of the hub. The teams are scattered throughout the country, then there’s me, what I call the red headed step child. I fill in doing everything, which is perfectly ok with me. Since I’ve been doing this double Memphis turn the last 6 weeks, I’m working an average of 41 hours per week making bank. I’m still learning the FedEx way, but it’s been pretty cool. I thought I would never like working nights doing Linehaul, but this particular run has turned into a pretty good gig. Like I said before, there is definitely life after OTR, you just have to look for it.

 

Left Humboldt last night at 8:30. Got my set built in 15 minutes. It’s the first set I’ve had to build in 6 weeks. Called into line haul and got set up in the system for dispatch. Got to Olive Branch at 10:15, broke my set down, found my 2 trailers for my return, was pulling out of the hub at 11:15. Was done in Humboldt at 1:45 this morning.

I have a question for some of you regular brethren that has done these doubles regularly. One of the first things I was told when I got involved with pulling doubles was to keep the heavier trailer on the truck and the lighter one on the dolly. What would any of you say is the cut off for the trailer weight? Is it ok for the front trailer to be, let’s say, 1500 pounds lighter than the rear trailer? The reason I’m asking is at times building a set in OB or Memphis can be very busy, or the trailers aren’t staged correctly to build without shutting down the whole lot while I maneuver my trailers to set up properly. I’m not one to cut corners safety wise, I’m just curious as I’ve always wondered about the proper weight displacement.

 

We never see the inside of the trailers. They’re always loaded and sealed. I’ve done this enough to know by feel how the trailers are loaded, nose heavy, tail heavy or god forbid evenly. Unfortunately, if a trailer is loaded tail or rear heavy, the only way I know is when I leave the hub and get 3 miles down the road. For the most part, the trailers are usually within 2000 pounds of each other. Occasionally there’s that one set that has 12-15 thousand in the lead trailer and 2500 in the rear trailer. I have access to trailer weights on my app to know which way to build the set.