Beep Beep Roadrunner

For the drivers on the trailer pool, it is primarily drop and hook. In my case I have my own trailer so there is more delay waiting to get unloaded/reloaded at terminals.

For my post above, I delivered 1st stop to an agent terminal in New Orleans (meaning they take inbound but don't offer outbound to RR drivers) and final stop in Orlando FL. Orlando is the same thing, a RR agent terminal but one time when I was using a pool trailer to deliver they allowed me to swap into an empty RR pool trailer which I ran back up to Atlanta and dropped and waited for an outbound load that night.

To explain it a little better, if you are on the trailer pool what happens is you get loaded and deliver your trailer to the next terminal. Call a day or two out and let the inbound terminal know you're on the way and they will ask you where do you want to go and will preload a trailer for you. As soon as you get there you drop your trailer in the dock or yard and hook your preloaded and bounce to the next terminal.

Occasionally you will be delivering to an agent terminal which may or may not have outbound options. At that point you can call the RR agent broker to look for a load near you delivering to nearby the next RR terminal which would put you back in to T2Tnetwork with limited deadhead.Edit, one time I did an Omaha/Kansas City run and RR person called and told me to go ahead and deadhead to St Louis for a reload that night. I asked if it was a 'for sure' thing he affirmed but when I got there they claimed they didn't have enough freight to finish my trailer out. That is the kind of thing that sucks because they are using my trailer as storage to free up room on their docks and there is nothing I can do about it except suck it up and wait. I can't prove it but I believe what happens too, is maybe there is an inbound team truck and they will 'steal' freight off my load to preload another trailer to keep that team moving priority. I am thinking of trying an experiment of hiring a team mate next month to see if my truck can be kept busier. Did talk to one team, they claim to never sit around waiting for freight is why i have that theory.

I will give you one example to avoid, avoid Denver final if at all possible. If the load is 1st stop Denver final Salt Lake City, that is OK. If you end up in Denver you'll be smarter to deadhead to SLC or Los Angeles for your next load rather than run for the $0.80 they offer.

 

So it has been a couple months since I updated my thread here. Been running pretty good I'll say. Sometime before the end of the year, received an email about corporate not helping IC's who break down any more. Can't prove it but feel like since that policy went into effect my miles have gone up, figure a bunch of IC's broke down and didn't have the funds to get back up and running creating more freight for those of us left. Honestly it needed to happen one way or another, I felt they had too many trucks for too little freight in this economy.

For a while there I was running back and forth between Seattle term and St Paul term about 3300 miles a week. Loved it. Then I got down into Houston market and back to sitting around 2-4 days between loads for a short time. Since first of the year been running pretty well non stop. Got into LIvermore CA and offered a run to Nashville TN 1st stop Sterling VA final. Deadhead up to Pottstown PA for aquick run to Chicago and reload to Sacramento. Go home for a day and a half and reload to Detroit. Detroit back to LA and LA back to Detroit now. \

In between all that my fan clutch went out and $2700 to repair it. A huge amount of that charge went to a courier who had to go out to Cheyenne WY and Denver CO for parts and bring back to Rawlins WY where I was broke down.

On this trip I was parked at the truckstop and another driver dragged his trailer right across my fender/hood so I'm in the process of renting a truck to finish the load while mine gets a new hood and paint.

 

Not sure what you mean there, the truck is mine so I was responsible to pay the fan clutch and the insurance is taking care of the rental truck and repairs to my truck. By the way I'm still in the rental truck now nearly 2 full months after mine got hit .

Been still running good this year. My truck was hit and RR repowered the load and went into my EFS card and took the $1300 advance back. I did however get the linehaul rate and fuel surcharge paid for the load up to the point I got hit in Albuquerque. So in other words they paid me for the miles from Los Angeles to Albu on the settlement but took back all the advance which was weird but OK.

After that I got a load up to Detroit where my trailer got repowered to, as soon as a roll in I see a guy pulling my trailer out of the docks. I park in front of him and walk up to him and he's pissed. I say where are you going with my trailer? Let's just say I haven't seen my trailer in 2 months. Been pulling pool trailers and a couple have had bad tires. Now in the past I have had major problems getting things fixed on the pool trailers, not anymore, we now use Penske breakdown 800 number to call to fix any problems on trailers, no muss no fuss.

So the first Penske truck I rented, it had over 800,000 miles on it and simply stopped its engine out of the blue at 65 miles per hour. Pulled over best I could with no power and figured to start it back up to get off the white line but it would not restart. Mechanic figured it blew its engine. They brought me another on on the hook and have been running it ever since. Been pulled into a few states wanting to see the rental agreement because I don't drive for Penske. I told them if I put the RR decals on the truck, guaranteed it will break down and they will bring me another Penske truck and though I do have some RR decals they are hard to come by. They don't care, put the decals on. Sure enough climbing Donner Saturday the engine shut off and smoke pouring out the engine area. Turns out to be a blown heater hose is all so we are back up and running.

 

The rates for some terminals came up $0.05 cents per mile. And the spot rate percentage went from 92% to 94%. They also added $0.02 to hazmat loads for a total of $0.06 for hazmat. Raised bonus from $0.04 to $0.06 as well.

My truck was hit in February and they repowered my trailer so since then I have been running RR pool trailers and doing very little sitting at terminals. Of course a lot of that has to do with being here a couple years and learning the system and knowing everyone's phone number and email address. Message a day or two in advance and the inbound terminal will have me set up already with an outbound loaded trailer when I get there.

Get calls daily from RR agents who want to load me on the spot market. However they cannot go above $1.10 a mile (94% of that is the true rate) so I never use them. i tried to explain to them why do I want your $1.05 load when I get $1.05 plus $0.18 plus $0.06 fuel discount plus $0.06 hazmat plus $0.06 performance= $1.41 means the spot market load must pay $1.50 just to equal that. Crickets....