Folks who work/worked Line-haul, how's the lifestyle??

I usually work 14 hours per shift and every week or so an occasional 16.
Home every day though..

 

Never ever ever. Lol

 

We been doing this a long time. There are NO traffic jams. Trailers are pre tripped before loading and temperatures set. Weather is not a issue, line haul drivers need 7 years hwy experience with 3 years pulling trains to qualify so we run through any weather. We are not alone as you can set your clock to the timing of the competitors trucks as well. I haul time sensitive freight although a hour late is not a problem. Trailer is stripped and cross docked as soon as it hits the dock. If trailer is not loaded on time where dock staff have 1 hour grace they close the doors whether trailer loaded or not. Some companies can run on schedule. I can count on one hand the days I might be late annually

 

What company do you drive for?

 

That's a good deal. Unfortunately, all our trailers are shared throughout the system (except liftgates), because all of our linehaul runs on long boxes. I swear some terminals are even better than others. Ours tends to have a good PTI culture in general, though. It's part of being truly professional.

 

Good luck!

 

Well, I had a good day today, and I fixed a good dinner tonight, so I'm in kind of a laid-back mood right now.
So I'd prefer to say there's a lot of good drivers on both sides!

Those hours are OK when you're young, or don't have someone at home waiting for you. And if you're raising a young family, they may be necessary to keep finances on an even keel.
But they are more than I ever would have been interested in, by the time I got into LTL. Our usual days were 10-12 hours, with weekends and holidays off, mostly. Occasionally you'd have a really long day. Hey, it's trucking.

Our trailers were all over the system. At least the pups were. We did tend to keep the same long boxes, particularly the '53 footers.
Also, being that our yard was at the company headquarters, all the other docks shipped their dogs to us, to be surveyed out. And they often either came in loaded, or line haul would "forget" to red tag them.
So they would end up at the dock, and get reloaded. Then when you hooked to it, and pretripped it, you had the choice of trying to get the dock crew to pull the freight off and put it on another trailer, (if one was even available,) or run with it. So unless there was a MAJOR safety issue, we'd make the run with it, then red tag it and park it in the bone yard.
Either way, it was time consuming, and could have been avoided by people doing their jobs.

 

Coming from the oilfield at 6 times the pay, and with mounting legal fees due to divorce, and needing psychiatrists for my kids to protect them from their moms mental illness, I don't have much choice in the matter. Free medical and dental with a zero $ deductible is kinda hard to come by.
I don't have much of a life, but I'm able to protect my kids from their moms insanity and keep the damage to my kids to a minimum..

 

Man it sounds like you've made the best of it. Sorry to hear about your situation. I hope you know that I was not putting you down at all. I was just speaking of my own situation.
A man does what it takes for his kids.