Outside the box ideas to use a new CDL for?

You are not going to be solo OTR with a company anytime soon, you will be with a trainer OTR. That's just the way the cookie crumbles. And you really cannot do OTR with going home every night or every day.

The absolute closest real world use of CDL in OTR combined with Home daily, Im pretty sure @Chinatown will agree with me is to hire on to say ABF, UPS etc. You will be taking a set of doubles out say 300 miles and meet up with your other half coming 300 miles to swap trailers with you and you return home to your original home yard. That way both you and your driver teammate with his truck will have completed potentially 4 trailer loads over 600 miles today and go home tonight to do it again in the morning.

There is a old honored carrier called Old Dominion. If they are still the same blue and grey painted trucks I am thinking of, you would be a millionaire by 30 and not have to work by 42. It would be quite a rewarding life when you get to that point.

But you WILL be trained with someone else a while. It's just the way it has to be.

 

Well, there's all sorts of things locally, you could haul garbage from the transfer station to the landfill.

You could work for the state DOT I know the southern states like to run tanker trucks that dump ice treat down when it gets close to snowing.

Any kind of distribution business is usually local and home daily.

Is there a water company nearby. Like Distillata here in Cleveland they use trucks to haul water from the spring to there plant in down town Cleveland.

There's also some local dry van companies that run freight around the state and around the city. Cleveland Express Trucking around here is one of them.

Any place you go though you'll have to learn there procedures and how to drive the truck and do paper work and so on and so fourth.

 

The schools like to say their training is the best, and some are certainly good or above average, but that doesn't mean insurance companies recognize that as a fact. The school, any school, is to get the license. You learn 90% of this job riding with your first trainer.

 

Everything you have written says...

Yes, you are.

 

Schools like to brag they are the best.

Only the gullible ones swallow that hook line and sinker.

Tscottsme stole my thunder and say that school is just enough to get your CDL, your real education will begin with your first load in blood, sweat and tears. Especailly if the dispatcher knows you are so new you know nothing about that #### load that all other drivers have wisely rejected until he found you to take it.

God help you. HA.

Trucking you can do all over the place locally. My very favorite was blacktop paving. Day in and day out in a wonderful dumptruck and beaver trailer with backhoe and paver on it. Tourenau I think it's called. With a bunch of axles under tehre and airbrakes on what is termed best as a restricted CDL A. SInce I was a full blood CDL A it's fine.

I think I have about three years on it. Give or take. Since I was with close friends (RIP snowball dead at 59 from shoveling snow presidents day blizzard roughly 3 years ago.) he was my foreman. My top boss who owned the whole paving company among other things like his farm... where I used a big block dodge 1955 flatbed dually with three on the tree manual to haul his hay... sometimes stone up to 15000 pounds on the back. (That thing was amazing strong. I would loved to have bought it... maybe i better before i rusts away... I can use that beast here in Arkansas.)

 

I'm sure its a good or great school. But wherever you go to school it's only real purpose is to get the license. All of the shifting & backing practice in the longest school will be less that 1 week riding with a trainer? No school sends you to grumpy gate guards, disinterested shipping clerks/ fingernail technicians, etc.

I went to the most expensive & prestigious aviation university in this country. I'm driving a truck, not "flying rubber dog poop out of Hong Kong" like I expected.

 

I would also add that most government driving jobs are not required to have a physical. At least that was what I understood!