Team drivers: How do you sleep?

I learned to team doing the 5/5 split. Isn't legal now and is hard to do if you are running e-logs. The 5/5 split is perfect because no one can sit in the back of that sleeper for 10hrs! Its illegal to sit in the passenger seat unless you are on-duty and I have been ticketed for it. Not condoning this but they really need to work on that law. Its ridiculous. As a team no one is going to drive tired because there is no reason to. YOU HAVE TWO DRIVERS!!! Driving 5's worked out so killer! This way we each drove during the day and we each drove some of the night hours. This allowed us to keep some sort of circadian rhythm.

12/12 is going to be very tough. No wonder you are having problems sleeping. I am sorry but I am not familiar with e-logs but maybe get with your trainer and see what you can do about running the least amount of hours and logging legal on your computer.

As far as the rest of it goes, it is going to take you some time to get used to sleeping in a dark closet on a roller coaster. Like I said the benadryl really helped and will keep you from sneezing. Another thing I used to do is eat as soon as I got up and never any other time. Same with drinking, I would try not to drink any liquids about 2 hrs before I went back in the sleeper. Like I said before keep it dark and keep it cold in the sleeper. This makes you sleep better. Ear plugs are a must and those long body pillows keep you from moving all around.

 

if I would have trusted my teamate at all (barely enough not to kill us) we would've ran on each others logs. Wouldve been way more productive and less tiring. switch when we need a short nap or cant sleep and switch back on whoever feels like driving. iowa and nebraska would be a lot less painful to stay awake thru if you could flip flop every 2-4 hours.

Yeah I know its completely illegal but HOS werent designed or even considered team driving needs. You cant have special rules for every division of trucking but teaming and LTL seem to have very specific needs that cant be lumped into one category

 

One of the possible changes in the HOS proposal that is still being decided on is you can sit in the jump seat for 2 hours logged as off duty. It's about the only change that makes any sense and that I'd like to see.