My 2 & 1/2 Years with McElroy Truck Lines, Inc.

Bluelinx is going pretty good man, thanks for asking. I'm starting to get used to the local work and it's many different little quirks. I picked up about 6 hours of O.T. this past week, so that should help.

The McElroy sleepers are plenty big enough but they are NOT "condos". I went through my PC and found some photos I took some time back of my McElroy Tractor to show a non-driver friend of mine. I have uploaded them to my profile as an "album" entitled "Inside the McElroy Sleeper" so that you can see how I used to run. Now bear in mind, when you carry as much "stuff" as I did, there are "upsides" and "downsides".

The Upside is - I had everything but running water. The only time I stopped at a truck stop was to fuel. I got to the point that unless it was absolutely "critical" to do otherwise - I would run straight from shipper to receiver and park overnight at the receiver. That way, you are guaranteed a place to park, you are first in line to be unloaded in the morning, and you get your 10 hr break behind you for the next day. I used a coleman camping stove to cook hot foods, and if there was no T.V. reception, I had plenty of DVDs on hand to keep myself amused. Also, of course, I never had to worry about finding a bathroom as I carried my own with me.

The downside is - more "homework" to do on your weekends off. Cleaning cookware, dumping camping toilet, restocking food. And God Forbid if you have to move into another truck or get picked up from a repair shop by another trucker LOL! It happened to me and it was a giant pain. Most guys I knew ran with way less "stuff" than me, by when I was O.T.R. I considered the rig MY HOME and so I enjoyed having all of the ammenities. BTW - I am about 6'2" and I could stand completely upright in the sleeper birth with no problems and I fit in the bunk just fine. Check out the album for details if you like

 

Yeah,

I was the only guy I knew in the fleet that carried a camping toilet, but to ME, it was well worth the extra work and expense it entailed. First of all, MOST places you are delivering to will be CLOSED when you finally get there, so you can't count on using their "facilities" at night. Secondly, if you have your own "john", you don't have to pull into a rest area and pray there is a parking space available if you need to release some consumed coffee. I could just pull off on the shoulder, put on the flashers, and step back into my "bedroom" to take care of business. Thirdly, sometimes you just get an upset stomach for whatever reason, and after watching my trainer have to climb out of the bunk at 2:30AM one night, get dressed, grab a roll of T.P. and lumber out into the snow to take a #2 beside some building, I was like "Oh HELL NO!".

So, you can pick up the Coleman camping toilet for roughly $100 or so at a WalMart and the liquid deoderizer is about $6 a bottle. I used half a bottle per week. That is a TAX DEDUCTIBLE expense. ANYTHING purchased FOR and USED EXCLUSIVELY IN THE TRUCK is a WRITE OFF.

Trust Me, the TAX BREAKS are one of the most attraactive benefits of being O.T.R.

 

notarps4me is correct. McElroy gets you home every weekend, Just remember that it is a "trucker's weekend". There is no guarantee about what time you will finally make it home on Friday (if at all), and there is no guarantee about how late you may be able to stay home on Sunday.

During the winter months, it was not uncommon for me to be home early Friday afternoon. During the busier times, I would roll in around Midnight. If your Monday morning load is due 600 miles from your house, you can expect to have to leave out for the week at 8:00am Sunday. If, on the other hand, you Monday load is going around the block from your house, you leave out butt-thirty on Monday morning.

The general rule of thumb is that they want you parked at your Monday consignee with your 10 hour break behind you. So if your load is due Monday at 7:00am, then you need to send your "arrived at consignee" message from the consignee's parking lot by no later than 9:00pm sunday night. Therefore, you calculate how far away your consignee is from your house and derive what time you should leave. (An easy method is to figure an average of one hour = 50 miles, which accounts for traffic and varying speed limits depending on your destination)

I never saw it printed in the handbook, but I heard other drivers tell me that their fleet managers said you could leave out Monday morning if the load was going 250 miles or less, but my fleet manager worked directly for my Terminal Manager, and Not getting that 10 hr break behind you for Monday was a big time "NO-NO" with him.