Curtain Flatbed Companies? (Curiosity)

Conestogas are great for the segment that hauls everything requiring tarping. Grain in bags, legal steel, sucker rod out to the oil fields...you get the point. I've seen some of those people who speak with accents haul oversized with them....? Covered wagons are great as long as you don't let your tarp fall to the ground, plus you're not limited. Oversized? Just stow your kit against the bulkhead.

Those bunk curtains, though.... Why doesn't the t660 have the wrap-around kind? And why is the vinyl first the bunk so ###### heavy? LoL
Again, if your English is limited, they work to keep the police from seeing that you're talking on the phone or texting and your foot on the dash can help keep them from moving too far forward.

 

Curtian vans or Conestoga?

I've seen curtan vans in CA hauling stuff for plywood, locally. Mostly small businesses that only haul thier own product. A rare bird to see OTR.

Curtans are like a van trailer with a hard top and a soft side and maybe, but not always, swinging doors on the back?

 

Yeah...those curtainsides are more trouble than they're worth, what with all the ratcheting one must do to secure the two curtain sides (hence the nickname "curtainsides") for transport. One other nifty headache about those curtainside trailers are the support bars inside the trailer...they can be moved around, and they're in there to help suport the hardtop, but they are a PITA to fool with. Left to it, I much prefer a "Conestoga" (also colloquially called "roll-tite", which has the sliding three-sided tarp curtain. The problem with those, however, is when empty, that curtain becomes one big giant wind wall. (I and ithers I've seen mitigate that by ratcheting the curtain, tarp folds tucked in, up against the header board while empty. It also helps when carrying OD on a Conestoga deck.

Those systems are pricey to install, though...a decent one may run about $15K to install, and depending on the manufacturer they add some weight as well. One other thing most don't realize is that a roll-tite curtain, because of how it's designed and mounted, essentially turns a 102" into a 107(ish)", so mirrors definitely need adjusted properly.

 

That's my only real gripe about conestogas. You cant really see around the trailer anymore or, even, your marker lights on the rear corners.

 

What kind of truck you got? Bunch of places offer a wider mirrors the bolt right up. Might be some for your model, worthwhile looking into.

Mirror Brackets - Kenworth | A&A Stainless Steel Plus

 

For what it may be worth, TMC also runs Connies, some of them being three-axles, on some of their ALCOA and Logan Aluminum dedicated accounts. (But I wouldn't recommend it--those loads don't pay well at all; yet they want to move MORE of it at a time, hence the extra axle. Great for guaranteed home time; not so great for a half-decent paycheck.)

There's another company out there that runs Connies as well, though not exclusively: Area Transportation, which I think is based somewhere up in northern Indiana. They do a LOT of steel--coil, plate, whatever---that may be their cash cow. (They have some REALLY nice equipment, too.)

 

I have a T660 now and the last time I ran conestogas it was with a T660