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

When I started driving for Abilene 9 years ago, we ran a lot tighter on delivery times. I could pick up a load off the yard at 8:00am that might only be 200 miles, but it delivered later that day. And as soon as I was finished making delivery, they would find me another load to keep rolling.

Over time, and especially over the last 3-4 years, that has stopped being the case. Our loads now usually have a great deal of dead time on them. It's not uncommon to get a 300 mile load that picks up at 8:00am today and delivers at 11:00am tomorrow. And if you get a load out of Richmond on Friday, it's very likely that it won't deliver until Monday, no matter how far away (or how close) it is.

Whenever I've gotten a load with 1 or 2 days of dead time built in, I put in for layover. If I'm in the truck ready to roll, and the truck sits idle for 24 hours, then Abilene owes me layover. That's how it was explained to me 9 years ago, and I hold Abilene to it. If they want to pay me $150 a day to babysit their freight, welp, it's their money.

Apparently the Mothership has decided that enough is enough! They're tired of paying us $150 a day to sit around doing nothing because of all the dead time on our loads!

So, going forward, they're only going to pay us $100 a day for layover.

That's less for layover than what they were paying 12 years ago when JohnBoy started this thread.

 

Small world - I live down the road from the dealer that truck was sitting at. Saw it sitting there for a bit but I thought it may have been a lease truck or something since it was gray with small logos (but I don’t know much about AMX) and the driver bailed out. They have been getting A LOT of the new Volvos coming in on the hook, especially new ones leaving the plant due to the proximity of the route south I guess. Hopefully you have good luck with it!