Overweight on trailer.....unless I violated the bridge law

If it were truly a bridge law then your gross weight would depend on where your axles are set. It’s simply a kingpin regulation because they don’t want people running around with their tandems all the way back on a 53ft trailer. If it were truly a bridge law about weight then all the states with a king pin rule would enforce it on all trailers, 48ft trailers wouldn’t be getting a free pass.

 

If you look at your link, there is this chart



Notice how it number of axles on the top and on the side the distance between axles? That is bridge law.

With a 5 axle set up, in order to meet bridge law there must be at least 51 feet between the front axle and the rearmost axle in order to gross 80,000 lbs. A driver can have MORE than 51 feet, but cannot be less. With a standard 53 foot trailer it is virtually impossible to violate bridge law on a 5 axle set up - even running a COE day cab. The steer axle would have to be less that 3 feet from the nose of the trailer.



This is KPRA, measuring how far the center of the rear axle can be from the center of the kingpin. Different states have the measurement set to center of the axle group, but this chart has adjusted to use a standard measuring point to avoid confusion.

 

Oh yeah you’re right

sorry , brain fart .

 

My opinion neither one, first thing I do with a new trailerload is get a CAT Scale, If I can't make it legal I will not take it down the road. I just had this discussion with a company I temp for in the harbor. tandems were at 36500, can not slide. Simply told them the seal would have to be broken and the load reworked,I would not take it. TYhey had me drop there in the harbor and gfave me a new trailer number which scaled out 11900, 33750, 32500. And I rolled with it no problem. No one can make you take a ilegal load.

 

Again, it's not bridge law. Bridge law would be having too much weight on an axle group.

And again, I don't move the load if it's not legal. Company can figure out how they want to get the load legal but I'm not paying for any overweight fines nor risking being made liable for incidents that would otherwise not be my fault.