Stevens Transport aviary

while talking with the G2 student the other day, he brought up a point about the new ultra light trailers that Stevens should let us all know about..
If any of you have actually measured our trailers, you will find that at the front they are 13'4" and at the tail, 13'1". Not so with the newer trailers, they are 13'6" at the front, and 13'7" at the tail.. this is on a standard stevens tractor with low pro 22.5 tires. I did not believe him, so we measured, the trailer he had, and yep, 13'7"....

So much for fitting under certain elevated trains in New York.

 

What a colossal screw up! Can they "lower" the air ride a bit to get them legal?

Must have been an engineer involved in this build.

 

A couple sqirts of grease on the roof will do it!

 

Well now for the most screwed up load I've had to deal with in a lot of years!
Dropped my delivery in Portland yesterday morning and headed up to a little town outside of Moses Lake to pick up 38,685 pounds of 'frozen product'.
Set my reefer at -10 as the load assignment says, and headed for Washington Potato. It's natural to assume we know what we're picking up.
Heading to Maxton, NC...Cambell's Soup.
Arrive and told, "you guys are always a day late. I haven't any product for you today. Come back tomorrow."
Long story, lots of calls, it appears Campbells called him and he had us back into the door, where he magically had product to load.
We're finished, he puts a cable seal on the door before I can put load locks in.
Finimente!
Trouble is, I've got 139 40# sacks of potato flakes.
So here I go, headed across country with less than 6,000# of product.
I know it's wrong.
Stevens knows it can't be right.
But here I go anyway.
I will say, it was nice climbing Cabbage at 50mph!
Got a message this morning after my check call, "Your reefer is out of range, contact dispatch"
Now normally, those automatic messages are ignored, but what the heck. I responed with: "It's not out of range. I turned it off to prevent global warming!"
That got me a call back!
After much discussion in the back ground, I am now being routed to Sugar City,ID to pick up more product.
I'm not sure if it's to require me to run my reefer or if they hate the thought of my getting 10mpg.
Ya gotta love this business!

 

One run through one of those certain elevated trains in New York will take care of it.

 

As for the offers to help with loads, happens to the hubby and I at least once a week. They don't care if you are early, just sit and wait, after all, they are getting paid either salary or hourly, not by the mile.

And everytime we are in the NE or Chicago areas we get BS loads. We usually talk to the other Stevens drivers and more often than not at least one of them is given a 'plum' load that he doesn't have the hours to make while we are given a long (250+miles) DH and short run that takes us a max of 24-36hrs. It happens very often that it is a trainer with a T1 or T2 student that is not able to make the run, and as a full team we could make it easily, but the trainers get the choice runs because of their trainer status, doesn't matter that they can't make on time delivery.

We have 'heard thru the grapevine' that there is a new computer program that will be put into place soon that will do the dispatches. It is supposed to dispatch according to length of run, hours driver has available, etc. It should remove some of the 'favoritism' that currently comes into play.

Hope everyone has a Blessed Thanksgiving. As for the hubby and me, we will be on the road to Morris, IL, guess they put us on Perdue dedicated but forgot to tell us. As TLea said, I think it's time to start taking the holidays off since no one seems to appreciate our efforts to help keep the freight moving.

 

Those of us who eat appreciate your efforts to keep the freight moving. From one who does, to all of you who help make my food possible, thank you.

 

For any one interested in what it is like to be on the road, I found a You Tube series titled Trucker's life by journey95 his name is Vince and after watching the video he is a Stevens Driver although he never says what company he works for there are several things that give it a way great series is 20 videos long. Hope all who watch it enjoy it.

 

Actually, he is a TransAm driver, but it is a good series nonetheless. The #1 thing that gives it away is the automatic T660 he drives. Stevens doesn't have any automatics in the fleet.

 

Thought he was with Stevens when he does the double take of the other Stevens truck and then you see his passenger side mirror which has G.O.A.L at the top of it. Oh well it is a good series none the less.