Everything going to regional? What do you think?

I have a friend who is a VP of operations for a midsize company. He was telling me that the money right now is in regional frieght. The railroad is killing the rates on the longer hauls.

 

Not quite, I missed the Age of the Dinosaurs by a couple of weeks.

Trucking is a business just like everything else; everything goes through cycles up and down. It's always amusing when someone when someone "new" to the business discovers some "new" method or principle that is really very old.

Boiled down to it's essence trucking is real simple to understand... move something from point A to point B as safely and economically as you can. Oddly enough, in the "bad old days" of regulation this was actually easier to do. In my opinion that was because there were fewer people involved in the management side and fewer companies and they understood the industry better for the most part. Oh we drivers P&Med alla time about em just the same and opined how "we'd do it different" were we in charge; but in point of fact we usually did better money-wise than we're doing today.

I lived in Atlantic Canada back then and used to regularly buy the old Overdrive magazine to keep up with what our American "Big Brothers" were doing. Still have several of them from back in the '70s and it's fun to leaf through em and remember. Dang, we need a section here for us ol' farts to tell stories from way back when.

Y'know what scares me about trucking in the here and now??? The thought that down the road you "newbies" will be telling stories about these being the "Good ol Days".