is an overweight ticket a moving violation?

Welcome to my Nightmare.

 

When I first got into trucking, I used to deliver to McD's stores, the company I worked for used to get overweight axle tickets at the POE in Cheyenne all the time, the truck going to the stores in Montana was the worst, two runs per week, at least one would have an overweight axle. Wyoming would have a field day, you'd get pointed to the scale, scale master would come outside with the tape measure, then have you park, show the problem, hand you the ticket. After a certain point, they threatened to pull the companies authority to operate in Wyoming they had so many tickets.

 

My favorite overweight was the ISO tank we ran up to Casper. Had it on a 3 axle chassis, I hit the port in Ft. Collins, I was 81,500 lbs. The scalemaster says "you're 1,500 lbs over gross", I point to the placarded ISO tank, he scratched his head a few minutes, I suggested I could open the valve and dump 1,500 lbs, he said that won't be needed, said I could have nice day.

 

Its not about "threat"... Its about "give us our money"

 

When I was in charge of operating an agricultural fertilizer mixing warehouse (we custom blended and delivered fertilizer to farmers) we hired O/O to haul bulk fertilizer into our facility from various storage facilities we had aroumd the area, none of which had onsite scales. The O/O was responsible for loading thier own truck with what ever equipment was available at the storage facility... Usually it was a loader.

One day we had one of our regular O/Os go get a load of a special type of potash from a storage facility about 25 miles away. This particular type of potash had a MUCH higher density than regular potash. He proceeded to load his A-Train hopper bottoms like he would with regular potash, shooting for a desired gross of about 105 to 120k. When he finished loading and began to pull out he noticed that his air pressure guage was wraped clear around against the back side of the ZERO peg and thought OH ####!!! He crept the entire way at 25 mph praying nothing would break. It was late in the wvening when he was expected in so I was the one in the scale house when he arrived... I about choked when I saw the read out of the scale, I hit print and waited for him to come inside. He asked "How F heavy am I?" I told him to go around and weigh it again, at which he paled. The second and 3rd weight confirmed the first... 187,360 pounds gross. He almost passed out when I showed him the scale tickets. While we unloaded his trailers I helped him go over his entire truck and trailers with a fine tooth comb to look for damage... We could only find 1 rivet in a non structural portion of the lead hopper that had popped, aside from that there was no damage.

From then on he always made sure to ask if the product he was picking up was of a higher than usual density. To this day he doesnt like to be reminded of that load.