Starting at Valley Transportation (Ashland, OH) Monday.

To elaborate on the park at home policy, Valley services and cleans its trucks over the weekends so that's why they're not too eager to let people take the trucks home. But I'm sure it can be worked out on a case by case basis.

Anyways, day two of being out with a trainer is done with now and it's really not going too badly. Nothing worthy of any of the horror stories I've seen in other posts. It's definitely pretty cool seeing the cranes loading and unloading coils and I'm looking forward to learning more about securement in the coming weeks. I haven't done any driving yet (waiting on drug test results, which should of course be clean since I don't eat poppy seed bagels) but I should start doing some and learning a few new tricks tomorrow as we head back towards Ohio.

My trainer, who at least one person reading this knows, definitely provided me with a lot if information to absorb. He drives pretty hard and doesn't stop for much, but fortunately, I've been able to keep up pretty well biologically and I don't think I'll have a hard time doing this for five weeks at least. I'm not sure if I'll drive this way on my own, but who knows, maybe it'll be the only thing I want to do once I have my own truck.

The only complaint I have so far is that the windshield of this truck is a gigantic bug magnet. I could dedicate an entire thead to all the bugs that have had the presence of mind to try a 65mph landing on the windshield and failed. But that's certainly no fault of my trainer or Valley. Bugs just wanna die apparently. Still, nothing I read on this forum or elsewhere prepared me for the windshield bugocalypse I've been witnessing.

 

You can take the truck home, yeah. Like I said, they want you to wait 6 months, but I'm sure they can work something out with you. Valley isn't a big mega artist like Werner or Schneider or TMC, etc, so they don't have a lot of absolutely set in stone policies like the bigger guys might. They'll work with you on certain things under certain conditions. It's just a matter of talking to the right person. So yeah, if you live 200 miles away or something, you might be able to take your truck right out of training. Just ask during your interview if it's something you're worried about.

 

Well, first week (4 days, anyways) on the road is done with and I'm pretty satisfied with the results. So far, I'm just happy that I'm biologically able to keep up with things.

Our week took us from the terminal in Ashland over to deliver in Clayton, NJ to unload the three aluminum coils we had out back when I got picked up. We unloaded and headed to Fairless Hills, PA for one big ol' #### near 20 ton steel coil, which we took out to Valley City, OH (no relation to the company, though it is only about 45 miles away from Ashland!). From there, we hit Yorkville, OH to pick up two skidded tin coils for Henderson, Kentucky (long night getting there!), then from Henderson, we bounced back up to Lewisport for another Clayton, NJ load that's sitting on the truck over the weekend for a Monday delivery. While in Jersey, both my trainer and myself are going to put in the cash and paperwork for our TWIC cards. We might pick up a load in the port while we're there, too.

Either way, it was a pretty profitable week for the truck. My trainer told me that he was carrying on a tradition from his trainer that if the truck made over $4000 in a week, he'd buy dinner the next week. I think our total this week was something like $3978 or something. Oh, well!

My trainer does things in a certain way and it seems to suit him very well. As I may or may not have said before, he's been driving with Valley for 7 years and has picked up a lot of information and tricks along the way. I think he's doing a pretty good job of helping me know what to expect (or not expect) in my first week alone, but he seems to think that my first 3 or 4 months on my own are going to be hell. I'm slightly more optimistic about venturing out alone, but I'm certainly going to approach it with more care and concern after hearing some of the "first week out" stories and briefly speaking with a guy who had just finished his first week out yesterday before coming home.

The first piece of advice I can give anyone going to Valley here from a school is FORGET EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED! Don't get in that seat thinking you know how to drive a truck because your three week course to get your CDL taught you how. It didn't. Your trainer will hate you if you do that. While I was fortunate to come in to Valley knowing that I knew nothing, it really goes far beyond even just learning to drive a different kind of truck.

The most significant change is the trailer. You'll all learn to drive on an empty van with tandem axles. That's great. Learn it, learn to drive it and back it and pass your test, then forget about it if you're coming to Valley, because the trailers are an entirely different beast. They have three things going on that are going to hurt you if you try to drive it like an empty van from school:

1. High center of gravity. Here's a little picture:

/0\

The / and \ are your chains/straps. They won't look exactly like that since they usually go through the center (also called the eye) of the coil. But the key thing to look at is that the 0, the coil, on the deck (___) is tall and more narrow than the trailer in most instances. This creates a high center of gravity. If you try to do a 5 mile an hour U-turn and get your tractor and trailer at more than, say, a 60 degree angle, it's probably going to roll. This is why Valley doesn't do U turns! You'll see a few pictures in the bathroom at Valley of trailers on their sides because people weren't thinking about the fact that what they're hauling is taller than it is wide and isn't all nice and evenly distributed along the trailer like a bunch of boxes/skids would be. So remember that when you go in to your first week at Valley.

2. The weight. Like I said in #1, the weight distribution is going to be a lot different. It'll either be all in the center of your trailer or (roughly) above the drive axles and one of the rear axles for most loads. But what I want to emphasize here is that the trailers will, indeed, have 40,000-45,000 pounds on them when you drive them and that's going to make things a hell of a lot different than pulling the school's beat up box.

3. Split axles. You can't move the trailer axles on the Valley flatbeds. Because of the configuration of them, you can put more weight on each axle: 20,000 each in addition to 17,000 on each drive axle and 12,000 on the steer axle. Note that it adds up to 86k, but you can still only carry 80 max including the truck and trailer themselves. It just makes it a little easier to work with when loading. But where the split axles will mess with you is in making turns. You're going to need a bit more room to get around corners. Sometimes, if a corner is really tight, there's a button in the cab of the truck that dumps the air in one of the rear axles so that you don't peel the tread off trying to get it around a corner. All in all, Valley's trailers are going to be incredibly different for you.

Now, don't go in to school and try to tell your trainer you're going to Valley and your trailers are going to be different so the stuff he's trying to tell you is meaningless. It's not. He's telling you how to drive a truck with an empty box on the back. So listen to him, do what he says and pass your test, THEN you can forget about everything they told you! Don't stress about the differences, just know about them coming in to Valley from school. Your trainer will tell you and show you everything you need to know! This is all stuff I've learned in the past week, just to show you what I mean. But I think it'll help a few people know what to expect when they go in to Valley and have to learn how to drive something new.

Of course, you're going to learn a lot of other things, too. I did my first chain on Friday morning after watching my trainer and listening to him talk about it all week and you'd be surprised how easily it comes to you after you've been watching and listening for the past week about how to secure a load. So if you start getting tired of seeing some guy chain things up, just remember that all of the repetition you're witnessing is going to be lodged in to your head so far that you'll be dreaming about it when it comes time for you to do it and it'll come almost naturally when you get in there and do it your first time.

You're going to learn how to do everything you learned from school in almost a completely different way. Your log books will be similar only in that you have to draw lines. Just about every other aspect is going to be pretty different. There's more paperwork, more stuff to think about and just a lot to put together. Individual trainers may vary, but it's been a little difficult for me to grasp some of the paperwork-related stuff he's been trying to teach me, but I think I have a decent understanding of it now at the end of the week.

All in all, I'm still 100% satisfied... starting to sound like a broken record. We're leaving early this week, Sunday night, so I don't have a full weekend to recover. But when I woke up today and didn't have anything to do, I found myself wanting to be back up in a sweaty, dirty, tarped, 130 degree trailer throwing chains around for some reason. I'm really enjoying it and I'm looking forward to learning more this week.

Oh, and another tip: Learn to love caffeine.

 

Oops, almost forgot to reply to this!

No problem!

Watch out for Arty, he likes to slip booze in his big thermos and might get blitzed while you're grinding the gears. Of course, he was probably just joking when he told us that. Probably. I don't think he'd complain if you brought him a bottle of Crown Royal, though!

If you choose Valley, just be ready to work. It's not as hard as TMC might be when it comes to chaining/strapping/tarping, but you'll do a lot of hard work nonetheless in chaining and other aspects of the job, so be ready for it.

And specifically for you being at Roadmaster in Columbus, spend as much time with the Volvos at Roadmaster as possible if you decide to go with Valley. Their trucks are almost identical (though much more clean and well-maintained, obviously). Also, raise a tiny bit of fuss if you get put in the single 9-speed they have for your shifting/road learning. It'll be much easier on you going to Valley if you have a basic idea how to shift a 10-speed.

 

Well, it's been a fun couple of weeks. Lots and lots of new stuff out there I've been learning, seeing and doing and I just finished up my first week on my own. I did good, I think.

First, the training: Covered just about everything I need to know, and I've been calling my trainer now and then to ask about anything I'm unsure of. The best thing about the training is that I've been floating gears since day one at Valley and it's second nature to me now, though I'm still getting the hang of some of the timing, especially when going up big hills from a stop. There's one in particular, if I take a certain route back to the terminal in Ashland, that's real tough to get up in anything higher than fifth gear. There are easier ways around to get there, but this route (even with the Hill of Doom) is faster and on a Friday night, it's worth the hassle to just deal with going up at 10mph or less for 30-45 seconds to get there and get home a little sooner. But I'm digressing!

Load securement is dead simple. Dead as in you (or someone else) will be dead if you don't do it right and simple as in there's only one way to do it: The right way. that said, it's not too hard. There's a chart in the documentation Valley gives you, but I just use a pretty simple formula that accomplishes the same goal. One chain per every 12,000 pounds, plus one extra chain for suicide, and round to the highest even number for shotgun. E.G. a 21,000 pound aluminum coil would take three chains suicide, four chains shotgun. The rest (trip blocks, when/where to use straps, skidded coils, etc.) are all pretty straightforward and I learned how to do all of it through my training.

I do have one bad story, though! The story is titled: Get Your TWIC. My trainer, who had his TWIC, got a load coming out of a port in Philly. The guard said I wasn't allowed in because I didn't have mine, so I had to wait outside the port. Two things made this bad. The Greenwich Terminal longshoremen are about as organized and hard-working as... Well, union longshoremen. I stood out in the hot, baking sun without sunscreen for 4 hours while they farted around getting my trainer loaded. As I mentioned, it was hot and I was burning up like the morning after my uncle Jake's 3-pepper chili. Runners up in the "things that suck about Greenwich Terminal" contest are the massive amounts of trash, litter and filth just laying around on the ground (the place must double as the local landfill) and the wasp infestation (got stung twice, probably by the same wasp). The lingering aroma of urine wins bonus points for sucking. Fortunately, I had my iPhone with me, so I just sucked it up, sat on a concrete divider and played some games while I waited. Spent all weekend peeling my arms and neck, which was fun.

Meanwhile, they searched my trainer's truck twice because they thought I was hiding in the bunk even after he pointed at me and said "He's standing right there, idiots" more than a few times. One time, they even climbed in to his cab while he was on the trailer without even asking and started looking around, which he took some offense to.

Moral of the story is: Get a TWIC. And Philly sucks!

Now, all 5 weeks, my trainer was saying "Your first week is going to be hell. You're going to hate it, you're going to want to quit, blah, blah, blah." His negativity and pessimism about my first week knew no bounds! He may have been grossly exaggerating so that I would be expecting the worst, but be surprised by how relatively simple it was. Who knows! All I know is that my first week was not hell. He said I'd probably call him three or four times a day. I called him one time for directions and two additional times to get some help with securing a couple of loads I'd never seen before - more on that later. Other than that, I didn't have any trouble driving, securing, loading, unloading, checking in, doing paperwork, etc. thanks to a combination of good training and my ability to pick up on things pretty quick.

First week alone, I went from Uhrichsville, OH to Lewisport, KY, then Lewisport to Indianapolis, then deadheaded from Indy to Terre Haute, took a load from Terre Haute to Cleveland, then deadheaded from Cleveland back to Uhrichsville for another load to Lewisport. I have a load going to Clayton, NJ sitting on the truck right now for Monday, which is a great way to start a week. Still, these loads were pretty... unique, to say the least, and I spent a good deal of time cussing and grumbling while I took care of securing and tarping them. I'll tell ya, there's no end to how much better cussing up a storm at a coil makes you feel. It's all worth it when you get in to that truck, turn on the AC, rehydrate and get rolling, though. I think that's the greatest feeling in the world.

The Uhrichsville coils are something like 8 feet tall and you really have to mess with the tarp to get it over the coil, which is a pain in the butt. I cussed at the tarp both times a bit, but got it done nonetheless. Then the one I had going from Lewisport to Indy was one big, 18,000 pound suicide coil all nice and wrapped in plastic, with four little diamond plate coils already on skids in suicide position that were a hassle to secure. That was a weird load to place and tie down. The most annoying of the week was out of Terre Haute, five long, but small steel coils that I had them belly load. I had to put the binders inside the eyes because they were so short. And then that second Uhrichsville was the same as the first. Took me a while to secure all my stuff, but I'm getting better as I go along.

To make matters worse, my pickup's alternator died on me about 20 minutes from home last night at 2am, but it's all fixed now and I'm enjoying my day off. We'll see where next week takes me. All I can say is that I'm sore (especially my hands), tired, cut and bruised, dirty, will never get the grease out from under my fingernails and all my clothes are dirty as hell! But I love the job and it's very satisfying and fulfilling. I don't think I'll ever want to do anything else.