Refrigerated loads or dry van - which is more likely to need team drivers?

And by the same token you could be a reefer team sitting in Salinas Americold for three days and two nights burning all your fuel ready to go at a moment's notice maintaining a precool waiting on the so called emergency pickup.

That's back in 2001, Im still. no make that we, are still cranky over that.

We got out of the grocery crap finally. Medicines is where it's at. Memphis to anywhere west of rockies to maine overnight if need be.

 

I should clarify.

We hauled McKesson Medicine. these go into distribution that gets reloaded onto small box trucks at sunrise every morning in just about all major cities nation wide. The little medicine bottles are then drawn and put into sick people who have need of that. It varies from narcotics to cancer medicine and everything you can think of. You are monitored very closely, loads drop empty hook load and get out of memphis without stopping until arrival overnight next morning.

Medicines come off your trailer, waste cardboard reloaded within the hour or in a 9-11 situation reloaded with medicines needed for CT which handles all east coast medicine. And off you go. If it's cardboard bales back to Memphis you go. chop chop. This is where a good team shines. It's always overnight. You dont get into any of the warehoueses either. They bring the bills and so on out to you.

It's our best work.

 

1. Why are you getting/accepting these short loads with far out appt times?
2. Are you solo or a team?

Sounds like you need a different broker or different employer

 

Well, dealing with brokers, you're going to get A LOT of the freight that the direct shipper carriers don't want. I'm a company driver at a refrigerated carrier. They rarely use brokers and have plenty of good direct shippers and an office that knows what they're doing. We do appointments loads (both ends) probably 95% of the time. I will rarely see a load that has "too much time on it". Most of the time the time is borderline doable with eLog hours but it keeps us (those who want to run hard) running near capacity virtually all the time, with an occasional "slow week" of 2,800-3,000 miles

 

With brokers, if I had to guess, you're better off with dry van freight as many of these dry loads will have open delivery windows. Refrigerated will likely be either too much time or too little time on the broker loads. Won't find a lot of "just right" loads with brokers.

 

Maybe, at least maybe some weeks, but a few long loads are going to make this easier than a number of shorter loads. Running 4,000 MPW consistently will require a lot of ground-work getting into some regular lanes with regular brokers where a mutual trust can be established. But won't take much of a hiccup to blow the possibility of a 4,000 mile week. You need to budget based on perhaps 3,000 (maybe even less) and hope for 4,000, at least in the beginning.

Running the eastern third (even half) of the nation, will make it all but impossible to do 4,000 mpw regularly. Too many traffic and crash delays and massive backups, especially during summer construction season. However, you'll see better rates running east, but you'll also see lot more toll expenses unless you lose valuable time running around toll roads.