Swift Again.....

They’re not the only ones.
Did a stint at the Walmart DC in Tomah,Wisconsin a week ago and they had a bunch of owner/operators running dedicated loads. There must’ve been at least well over a dozen of them there. This same time last year you saw maybe 5 or 6. I guess $5-7 dollars a gallon for diesel fuel changed their business plans.

 

How many axles? That's not a Swift rookie.

 

The no road is better, there's usually stacks of fresh cut timber at the end.

 

It was a JOKE.

 

They have triple axle trailers that run out west,especially in Oregon and Washington.

 

And, at one time they had 57’ trailers in their fleet. Not sure if they still do or not, this was 20 years ago.

 

Yes, I know. They were only use on dedicated accounts though. They were not something you would expect to see a new driver pulling.

 

Last time I saw some were at a Costco DC south of Tacoma,they had a bunch of them.

 

They still had them 8 years ago when I was there. They were the trailers with numbers starting with 75. I absolutely hated the 57 footers. You make a right turn with one of those and there had better not be anything or anybody to your left because that long tail is going to swing across like a barn door. I had to pull one of those through East Texas once. There were all those little towns where the highway has to go around a courthouse in a town square. Two right turns and two left turns. And don't even get me started about trying to park in a truck stop with one of those things, or trying to scale a heavy load with one.

 

They also had 14 foot high trailers. Those are only legal in certain western states. I had to refuse a load in Massachusetts once because it was preloaded on a fourteen footer. My DM freaked. She said you can't even buy a permit for those in Massachusetts. Some driver dropped it there, probably oblivious that it was oversize. As I recall, it was a hazmat load too.