FedEx Freight Diary (ala Russian Rabbit)

This week was a week that was all over the place. My run was cut 3 times this past week. Once for a lack of freight for my lane, the other two was for lack of available drivers. Those runs were nice, easy meet runs with no issues preventing a straight through trip using the GW Bridge to NJ, preventing me from adding another 40 minutes of transit by taking the Tappan Zee instead (I refuse to call it the Governor Mario Cuomo Bridge, it's a travesty that they named such a beautiful new bridge after him).

The lack of freight cut was no bueno, but could have been worse and not work that night. Instead, I bumped down to a run with almost half the mileage of my bid AND forced dock work. I'm much more effective in a yard horse than on a forklift, so fortunately that hub lets me work my magic in the yard instead. Me being on a lift virtually guarantees a 2 bill per hour move rating lol.

My "raise" went into effect, yippee. Only two more weeks until I'm working on top out scale, which I'll see on the November 8 stub.

 

The first point is a feat on it's own lol.

Remember, placards are a dock operation, not a driver operation, sucks drivers tend to get stuck with it. The supervisor in my center places and removes placards on every trailer necessary before he closes them to the road, fortunately. At the hub I go to, guys in my barn refuse hooks when they hand us placards with our paperwork. I just take them and put in for 10 minutes of delay time usually.

 

The trick to running a hub's yard effectively with several other hostlers is to reduce "empty travel" with the horses. When you have that many pages running at one time, you plan your moves accordingly. For example, accept a move from the house to the close line, as soon as you hook, complete the move manually on the computer and then look for the highest priority move to bring a trailer from the close line or the next closest zone to the close line instead of traveling back to the house with no trailer. Accept it on the computer and complete the move after you sink the trailer into the door. That way, the trailer you plan to move is pulled off the move list and belongs to you until you complete it.

When you have a move to pull an empty from the house to the empty line, look down the list for a move that requires an empty to be moved from the empty line to a door and kill two birds with one stone. When my buddy and I end up going to the dock bid hub, 3 of us are able to run a cramped and very busy yard for a 120 something door hub and keeping the moves down to 3 pages or less no matter what time of the evening. The last page is usually all van moves for a senior guy that does nothing but moves vans all night.

 

Come out East then, that hub could use a good regular hostler.