South African Trucker

O/O Owner Operator

 

The tickets they refer to are certifications, it's used for nearly everything in place of certificate. For truckers when they say I have all my tickets, it generally means the various safety courses required for access to sites in the oil patch, refineries, pipelines, etc.. A "B" hitch is fifth wheel mounted on top of the frame at the back of a lead semi-trailer, to allow it to hitch to a second semi-trailer. The original B-trains had two axles under that hitch, then they added a third axle and called a super B.

 

We used a similar setup in Ontario back in the late 70's/early 80's. A 16' tridem lead with a 32' tandem or tridem pup. I agree, they were easy to back up, rode nice and had lots of brakes, but the downfall of them was that they took too much weight off of the drives, which made it tough to climb a steep grade on ice or snow. We ran a lot into northern Quebec and if I had a dollar for every time I had to get out and chain up when it was -50 or so I'd love to say I could retire, truth is I woulda wasted that money on something stupid, like more trucks for example.

 

O/O is the same as Owner-Driver. Super Bs are a type of B-double. On top of what was stated above, tickets may also refer to traffic citations. Class 1 is the Canadian equivalent to your E+C, Class A is the US equivalent.

 

I don't know about Canada. If you ended up in the US, you might be able to find a small carrier whose insurance would take your E+C experience into consideration - the major carriers would not. I spent 18 months working in .za, and when I came back to the US, it was a mixed assortment - smaller and local carriers could use that as verifiable recent experience; the major carriers would not. However, I was a licensed and experienced Class A driver prior to my trip to the dark continent, as well. You'd also have to adjust to driving on the proper side of the road (I have some amusing and embarrassing stories in regards to this).
Your E+C would not convert directly to a US CDL - that part, you would have to start from scratch. I would imagine Canada would be similar, but again, I'll leave that to the Canadians to answer from a more knowledgeable perspective.