Contract or Common Authority

Good to see details.

 

Your authority can go active with out insurance on file, am I reading that correctly?

 

cargo insurance, fasttrack, not liability. while you may can get by without cargo ins, you are a nut not to have it. there seems to be some sort of weird way the value of a product goes up if you have a claim, bigbadbill is the smartest guy posting in this thread, never leave home without 100 grand of cargo.

remember it only potentially takes one claim to wipe out your business

 

If your planning on pulling hopper O.T.R. like i am B.John then you'll most likely want at least 75,000 in cargo ins. Most all shippers and brokers i haul for require at least that much. I do have a few that require a 100,00 though most are fertilizer production companies that have good rates or food grade organic commodities. If you seen how much a load of some of this fertilizer cost youd understand why. I would recommend 100,000 in cargo as there wasnt much price diffrence, i think maybe $20.00 more a year than the 75,000 for a year.

 

Not true Bill...

Traditionally contract carriage is where you ONLY haul for a specified customer with a contract for services/rates...

Common carrier means you haul for everyone.

As you can see the line between the two right now is non-existant..

 

I have common carrier authority.

 

We're both.... apparently back in the day you had to pay extra to apply for both but not anymore. My insurance lady told us just to do both since it didn't change price. I know one of them used to be you had to have cargo insurance on file to go active but I guess no more... I don't think it really even matters anymore, not sure anyone distinguishes between the two nowadays...

 

There ARE lots of 'contract carriers' out there.

While 'private carriage' used to be pretty common it isn't anymore. The cost of moving freight has gone down tremendously in the last 20 years and why would a business keep a fleet of trucks with all the inherent costs associated with them when they can hire the bottom feeders to almost pay them to haul their product?

You will still see a few 'contract carriers' as subsidiaries of major manufacturers who have created their own dedicated transport services to ONLY handle their freight and their raw materials as backhauls. They can haul their products cheaper, eliminate many of the bennies that the factory unionized workers have by being a separate entity.

I can remember when there were virtually thousands of manufacturers with their own private fleets...