Tanker Questions

Just be as smooth as you can be when shifting and braking. Stay behind the line about 10 feet and when stopped always keep your brake on. If you have to stop real fast be aware there's going to be another push that can move you forward then another and so on. Put a glass of water up on the dash fill it 3/4 full and drive and don't spill a drop. You'll just use to it and you should be paid better than most. Peronally I'd much rather haul gasoline. To me it's safer.

 

I haul milk here in Az. When you get to the dairy. You check the silos for amount of milk it has. We went by pounds here. not gals. What ever the gauge say the silo has. you time that by 7.6 if i remember right. That will tell you how many pounds there is. Then you check the temp of the milk. After that you run a hose from the silo to the tank. Before you do any thing. make sure the top lid is open. Open the val on the tank and turn on the pump and the val to the silo. We had different type of tankers. some hold more then other. It a long hours job. The dairy run 24 hours a day. it was a easy job, but long hours.

 

2 things I learned about haulin milk ,
If you have a less then full load it's gonna hurt.
Cows don't use log books.

 

You have to be smooth on acceleration, shifting and braking. Corners you really want to take it easy on also. The biggest surge is front to rear. Do not ever back off the brake at a red light. You will end up crossing the intersection.

 

Those milk trailers look to have about a 7,000 gallon capacity. If milk is 7.6lbs a gallon and you got say 50,000lbs of it, thats 6,578 gallons. Thats not to bad a surge for a smooth bore. With a day cab and a stainless steel, insulated trailer you'll probobly get on 53 thousand and fill it. Might not be a surge to speak of but i'll tell you how to drive with a dense product in a smooth bore.
Always start in your lowest gear, Give it almost no throttle when shifting, shift smoothly and progressively with low RPM's in the lower gears and give yourself plenty of distance from those in front of you. You should also shift with the surge meaning shift when the product is surging forward and use the momentum of it to shift smoothly. Trying to shift against the surge can cause you to miss a gear and get slamed hard. When coming to to a stop, be real easy on the brakes and start braking early. be careful downshifting because that surge can propel you forward and cause you to miss your gear and you will be slamed hard and loud when you hit the brakes. Its really like being smashed into by another truck from behind. Take them corners slower than you otherwise would because you will have a very high center of gravity that is always changing. If you are always mindful of what you are hauling you'll drive acordingly. It all eventually becomes natural though I don't think it will be to bad with milk.

 

It depends on when you let go. You may well hit the guy behind you. Or hell, you could roll out into the intersection then roll back and hit him.

 

This I have witnessed. I was hauling a smoothbore milk tanker outta Portales NM, and another driver was headed the same way. There's a railroad overpass just before you turn right to head east out of Clovis, and he had to brake fairly hard to get stopped for the red.
Fella must have let up on the brakes once he stopped, because that wad o' milk slammed up and sent him most of the way through the intersection.

One thing I learned about regional milk hauling... some of these outfits really don't *care* what your logbook says. On that haul, I told the dispatcher I was *way* out of hours... so she gave me some little white pills to take with me. How nice.