My 16 Week Experience with TRANSAM

I think we have to take Old Guy's commentary with a grain of salt. Until we hear from company drivers, it's hard to issue a fair ruling against TransAm.

You can take it with pepper for all I care. I can only tell you my experience as I lived it and the conclusions I came to as a result of my experience. I am sure others have had a different maybe better experience with TransAm. That is the same for every company talked about in these forums. Some people are treated well for some reason and others are treated poorly. Usually the problems of most were their own fault. Mine were not.

I've been in contact with TransAm for two weeks now. My recruiter says drivers are averaging 2800-3100 miles per week as of March. Recruiter says this figure comes from taking the total miles driven per month, then dividing it by four. Recruiter also says that their alleged practice of coercing newbies into the lease option is false.

I was told the same thing. What they do not tell you is that it is in the trucking company's best interest to have too many drivers in their fleet for their available freight. Some drivers are going to sit each week. This is a zero sum game especially during bad economic times. There are fewer companies chasing dwindling freight. Fewer companies means less opportunity and choices for drivers. Less freight means less work even at the companies that survive. TransAm could not care less whether you make a living wage. There will be 10 drivers to replace you when you cannot take it any more. They do not push you into leasing in the sense of putting you in a room and dripping water on your head until you give in; but every employee of TransAm gets a bonus if they sponsor someone into the lease program. You will be lied to about the lease program. Do not lease a truck from any company. The reason that trucking companies want you to lease is that it removes the cost of the truck from their books and places it on your head. The only incentive that they have for not having you sit is the cost of the truck and layover pay. If they are not responsible for the cost of the truck, they do not care how many drivers are sitting each week. The driver will be available when the freight shows up which helps their bottom line while not costing them anything. TransAm's rules on layover pay are written to almost guarantee that a driver can not qualify for it.

Of course, all of this is heresay, especially coming from a recruiter. All I know for sure is that TransAm is currently taking on student graduates and that there is not as much of a wait for orientation/trainer/truck as some other companies still taking students. This is probably a point against TransAm, however. With the economy at a stand still, is there something fishy about a carrier that is still actively recruiting? Maybe.

Student drivers are a profit center for TransAm and all the other training companies. It costs them less to have a new driver deliver their freight than an experienced driver.

From noob to noob, do your research thoroughly on ALL companies before you sign, and plan to stay with your choice for at least a year. Trucking companies loathe jumpers and won't invest time and money into training you if they think you're going to elope. Also, the economy the way it is, a reefer company is going to be your best bet right now, or a flatbed company once summer construction starts.

I agree about the reefer part. I was in the construction industry for over 30 years. The realities of the economy right now are that there will not be much summer construction to speak of for many years. Starving is starving whether you are driving a truck or sitting at home on unemployment. As for jumping, the game is rigged in the house's (company's) favor. You will be screwed in one way or another no matter what you do.

A final word. Thumper is right about not complaining and tightening your belt. I treat going into trucking the same as going into the army (maybe even prison). When you become a trucker, you're moving into your new home, like it or not. I don't mean house, either. I mean home. Where you live right now becomes a place youwill visit from time to time, as approved by your warden. Suck it up and come to terms with this, or you'll wash out and sure as the trucking industry's turnover rate is 150%.

Prison is a good analogy. Yes you have to become homeless to be able to live on the money that you will make driving a truck the first year. You will also have to realize that any relationship you are in will be mightily strained by this industry. Choose whether you wish to sentence yourself to this life or make another choice, but realize (in advance) what you are getting into.

Trucking is not for the thin-skinned. It isn't for the pessimists. It sure as hell isn't for the cry babies. And it's a good #### thing that it isn't. Otherwise, the industry would be saturated and there wouldn't be any room for student grads like me.

Just like in the carnival sideshow, there's one born every minute. The industry is saturated. You are in the pipeline to keep it saturated. You may be lucky and can make a living driving a truck. I wish you success, but be aware; you can do everything required of you as perfectly as it can be done and still starve. This is the reality that you should face. Your success in the trucking industry is not in your hands. You can deliver and pick up every load on time. You can have no tickets or accidents. You can follow every rule and regulation to the letter and spirit. You can do everything perfectly and still sit 3-4 days every single week. The reasons have nothing to do with your performance. They have to do with your location and the company's needs. It is not in your control. Long term TransAm drivers will tell you that the company did not use to be this way. Maybe they are new to the party as far as screwing their drivers. All I can tell you is that I was screwed and could not change it. I started this thread because the reason I decided to go with TransAm was that they had the least bad things said about them in these and other forums. My experience was not good, and I decided to tell others about it in part to correct the deficiency.

 

I think that no company intends to "screw" their drivers that is just how we percieve it. The reason they have drivers is to make money off of us. While it seems we are being screwed by the company its really the dispatchers and planners not doing there job that screws us.

A company does not care one way or the other whether you make money or not. If you are able to develop a relationship with your dispatcher to get sent on loads more than others; more power to you. If there is freight in your vicinity when you become free to haul it and there is no other driver that is more favored around, you will get freight. Otherwise you will sit until you are the only choice left. The company hires more drivers than it has freight in order to guarantee it will have drivers available all over its hauling area if freight becomes available. In this sense the company is setting you up for a screwing because it knows you will not be kept busy.

I don't work for TA but the company i drive for is having the same problems. My normal dispatcher tries to keep me rolling or home. If freight gets slow he brokers me out. This week he is off so I got stuck with someone else and I have been in toledo since monday waiting on a load. I am not getting rich because I am only averageing 1500 miles a week. It will get better. Patience is the key. Eventualy everything will fix itself and those of us still around will reap the rewards.

Let me know how that works out for you. Optimism is necessary in most human endeavors, but at some point a concession to reality has to be made. My miles got better after my dispatcher was fired, but still I averaged less per week than unemployment.

As for the lease thing, bad idea. If you want to be on your own buy a good used truck and then lease on with a good company. That will keep your overhead down. I know a new driver that bought a truck for $8500. Paid cash. Don't remember who he went with but he is saving all the money that he would have been paying in lease payments towards a new truck so when this one takes a dump he can either fix it or buy a new one.

I wish him luck. If we get back to $4.00 per gallon fuel he may have problems.

I am just going to stick it out. We have lost almost 200 trucks out of our fleet and because of that those of us still here are starting to get a little more frieght. Hopefully it will keep going this way until freight goes back up strong.

This is one of my points. Trucking is a zero sum game. In order for some to succeed, a bunch more have to fail or at least not make a very good living. The pie does not grow as fast as the competition for the pieces. The trucking companies hire faster than their need to guarantee plenty of drivers to service their freight business. Some of these drivers will not have as much freight to haul as they would wish or can legally haul. These drivers are being screwed by design by the trucking company. Those companies that go bankrupt or downsize merely transfer the game to new players.

 

That just shows that you haven't learned very much. Alot of people were making MORE money when fuel was high, myself included.

Educate me. How were you making more money when fuel was more expensive. As near as I could tell, the fuel surchage paid by TransAm was not enough to cover the cost of fuel ($4.00/5.5 miles per gallon[avg mileage for 2009 Kenworth] = $.73 per mile cost. Fuel surcharge at that time was approx. $.45 per loaded mile and $0.00 per deadhead mile for a net cost of $.28 to $.73 per mile). Maybe your math works differently from mine but TransAm was paying $.84 per mile to lease drivers at that time. $.84 plus $.45 =$1.29 per mile less lease costs (approx. $.50 per mile@ 2000 miles per week) and fuel costs ($.73 per mile) = $ .06 per mile net profit on loaded miles at 2000 miles per week or $120.00.
I rarely got over 2000 miles per week and some were deadhead miles at a net cost to me of $.39 per mile. If I had more than 307 deadhead miles in a week I had a $0.00 to negative pay check. I have detailed costs at $2.50 per gallon in a previous post. Even at $2.50 per gallon, a lease driver at TransAm is making less per mile than a beginning company driver. Tell me how you "made" more money at $4.00 per gallon fuel. If you are talking gross pay, that may be true but net is what counts. I am also not projecting the pay scale beyond TransAm. Please compare apples to apples and include reality in your discussion.

 

Good luck to you. I hope your experience is nothing like mine. Do not be a lease driver. If you live in the truck and do not have a home or family to pay for it is possible that you can make some money driving a truck in your first year. If you are single and have no large monetary commitments you might do ok. If you do have a home and family, it will be hard to keep one or the other of them driving a truck at present. You will have to make that choice at some time if that is your reality. The happiest people I ran into while driving were homeless former felons. This lifestyle suited them just fine.