charged trailer's?

i would like to convey a lesson i learned the hard way.whenever you are told you need to use intransit heat be mindful that the little tag on the front of the trailer saying this trailer was charged on the day of pickup is not always true....arghhh.yes i hooked up opened my valves to check for leaks and before i knew it most of my anti-freeze ran out on the ground(dirt lot).arghhhh again. there's a little valve in between the trailer tandems that was open, i had to slide up under the trailer just to close it. and then break out the gallon jugs to refill what was lost. don't believe any tag's on front of trailer when picking up. till you've checked it for yourself. just one experience that i remember when doing tanks.

 

i noticed that schneider used the kind of pump that wasn't shaft driven, so i don't know it looked like it ran off hydralic pressure. but the pump we used was a roper pump and ran off pto shaft application. i remember the first load i ran to des moines out charlotte, the first thing dispatch said was make sure the pump is not froze up before you kick the pto in gear upon unloading, i learned that a pipe wrench works real good on that flat sided shaft. nothing like using a pump with snow on the ground. good times..

 

just curious, have any of you tanker driver's have a customer that upon delivery they said it was okay to air off a flammable load with compressed air instead of nitrogen? you all know what they told you in safety meetings. big no no.... i ran into to that problem in n.j. very unsettling. i know they told us that for a reason. so i tried to make all the phone calls i could make to safety, basically it came down to get them to sign bills and stand out of the way....sheeshhhh.

 

Yes Catfish....and no, never, no way. Refused to deliver. Took a lot of heat from the carrier and the customer and didn't get paid but I'm here to write about it.

That's my line in the sand...safety for profit...... not going to happen.

 

Thanks for the post 1catfish , could you maybe go in depth about how the intransit heat works on a tank? I dont have any experience with this type of trailer but would be interested to know how it works and what products you haul with them.

 

Always carry a few gallons of pre-mix coolant in the side box.

 

yea, that old truck i was driving i carried at least 3 or 4 gallons jugs of coolant just incase.

 

I haven't dealt with any kind of loads like you're talking about but safety is the same for all of us. A very good training movie to see is the "Charlie Morecraft Story". All he does is talk about what happened to him when he got burned real bad the day before his vacation. It was in a refinery but on a valve that everyone knew was not working like it should have. He took the word of other workers and that is what happened. The message he conveys is it's you that will get hurt so don't take any short cuts and work for you and not them.

 

I used to deliver to the General Motors foundry in Defiance Oh. The product was a GP resin they used in the casting process and it carried a flammable placard. It was a thick, sticky goop that was a mixture of methanol, formaldehyde, urea and a few other equally nasty things. The unloader always tried to get us to air it off because he didn't want to roll the hoses after unloading to get all the goop out. It was a center drop trl and it took 4 3' hoses to unload. The product just wouldn't move thru a 2" hose. It was a pain to do and he b*tched about it the whole time. I told him if the only way we could legally use pressure to unload was to use nitrogen. He didn't understand why.