Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

If it's a Dollar General/Family Dollar load, then yes, that is exactly what they do. Dollar General is Hill-Phoenix's biggest account. They really really really don't want the drivers to be late for those deliveries.

 

If you're on time, you're late. If you're late, you're UA. Oh the joys of the corps and their idiosyncrasies.

 

DOT physical today. I am legal to drive for another year.

 

I sometimes wonder if it’s a blessing or a curse.

 

Here at the paper mill in Ashland. I have been here a dozen or so times, always with a delivery of scrap paper to be recycled. Today, however, I'm making a pickup. Five-ton paper rolls. Load assignment says that it's a pre-loaded trailer, but that is not the case. It is a live load.

So there I am, minding my own business in Dock #7. One of our Swift brethren pulls in next to me in Dock #6. He gets his tandems slid, gets square in the dock, all is well.

A few minutes later, I hear a loud crash. A really loud crash. An unusually loud crash.

Now, we've all been in docks before. We're familiar with loud noises. I have felt my truck shake on many occasions from whatever is taking place inside the next trailer over. So while this was definitely an unusually loud crash, I didn't think too much of it.

A few minutes after that, one of the warehouse dudes comes out to talk to me. He tells me they're not finished loading me, but they're going to unlock the dock, and could I go back into a dock a bit further down the building? Because the loud noise I heard was the Swift trailer collapsing almost in half.

They use 15-ton forklifts to load these 5-ton paper rolls. So that's 20 tons running up and down the trailer. And apparently this dude's trailer wasn't up to the task.

Only collapsed on one side. The Swift truck is now to my left, and from this side it looks normal. If I didn't know how it looked on the other side, I wouldn't think anything was amiss. But the trailer is definitely buckled just behind the landing gear on the trailer's left side.

I'm sure it was an attention-focusing experience for the guy driving the forklift.

What's really funny is that the Swift driver didn't think anything of the noise, either. After the warehouse guy asked me to move, he banged on the dude's truck. Dude was back in the bunk, and didn't know his trailer had buckled. I saw him look in his driver's side mirror and say "OH $#!+!!"

And now the driver has a day of phone calls and paperwork ahead of him.

 

After I left Abilene in 2021, I worked at ST Tissue in Franklin for a VERY short while. They are basically the warehouse/loading facility for IP. The mill would load our drop trailers, I’d haul the trailers from the mill to the warehouse and unload the rolls of paper, put them away. The clamp truck was always falling through the floors of these trailers. Or the floors would be crackling so much it scared the hello out of me. Said no thank you and peaced out of that job after only a month.

 

I briefly worked for swift and they really try to squeeze all the life out of their trailers.

 

The crackling was the actual wood on the floors. Those trailers had holes all over the place. The clamp truck tires would break through and you’d have to drop the roll, back up and then push the roll so you could grab it without getting in the hole. A couple of those trailers had so many holes it wasn’t funny. Even the side walls had holes. One of the guys had a trailer collapse on him and that was my last straw. I didn’t mind anything else about the job. Most of the carriers who came in to load had decent trailers and were inspected before getting loaded. It was just our yard trailers that were junk.