Car Hauling Is Not As Lucrative As It Once Was

It’s been a while. You doing linehaul or city? Most of the faces at your old loading yard are the same. Some of the trucks are a different color but the cars are still shipping. I thought CF would be my last job, but we know how that turned out.

 

Line haul in a sleeper/xtra board so I started at top rate and day time. 15 months I’m going city. Most guys went back after trying some other grass. Situation at home needed me home more and more stability.

 

You are going to get lazy doing that easy gig! I can’t say I don’t miss that easy work on occasion, but I don’t miss my old schedule. Do you run this way?

 

I lasted a proper 4 months at Hansen before I tapped out. The compensation vs. workload/responsibility just wasn't there for me at the time but there was still money to be made. IIRC I had couple of $1500 gross weeks in there, albeit working 6 days a week. I needed to be hitting the ground running and was under a lot of personal pressure, just not the greatest environment to be learning the art of car hauling.

I don't know about other companies but at Hansen I think it's mostly what you make of it. I also think that depending on the area and the freight you're given will greatly vary what kind of money you have the potential to make. I know that the dispatch in Brunswick had a complete separate stack of loads for some of "their" drivers so there was favoritism going on but if I had put in years of busting ### and doing the work, I guess I would expect a little favoritism as well.

For the record the numbers @Banker has posted before are completely possible to me. IIRC I had figured out that if I had been hauling as a O/O for Hansen I was going to gross around $5K a week, and I was a car hauling ROOKIE in the truest sense of the word. Although I wasn't the slowest car hauler in the world, there are guys out there that are just unbelievable on how quick they stack their trucks. I've seen guys load 10 cars to my 3. and I was hustlin. So don't just think you're gonna come in there and knock it out the park the first year, it's not happening.

The biggest mistake people can make coming into car hauling is doing it for the money. I think you have to come into it for the right reason, do the right thing and learn, stick it out for a while and the money will follow. I will always say it's a tough way to make a living, my hat is off to all of ya'll but I always come back here from time to time and wonder what could have been.

 

There are definitely easier ways to make a living, but I haven’t found any with this much flexibility.