The 'Gainey' Expierence

Well, I may be wrong on the truck speed, ours cruises at around 68 MPH and around 70ish MPH on the foot pedal. Despite the no forced routing they do tie fueling to the loads, and tell you exactly where to fuel and how much fuel to take at a time. They are fairly strict on that, which has caused us to have to reroute OUR preferred route to go to the fuel stop. They don't have an open network like the big guys where they give you a list of fuel stops you can stop at and a fuel card. You get a fuel card but its only active at the stops THEY have approved for THAT trip.

 

Got our new truck, its a marked improvement. Newer model, less miles, no dents, an apu sort of thing, a vorad blind side system, a built in cb speaker, and the transmission is in way better condition. No smoking has gone on it it! So yay, same make/model. Missing a front mirror though on the driver side... I'll have to buy one for it.

As for the miles, we got 1200 this weekend, picked up early sat morning delivered Sunday in the early am. We now sit till Monday to get the keys to our new truck, and currently have no load.

 

Well... the thing is the truck in the picture is a 379, my favorite type of truck... sitting next to a corvette. Only Werner seems to run the long noses as far as big co's go. Believe it or not, that was sorta why I decided to apply with them first lol. When Gainey gives me a 379, and/or we make enough cash with them to afford to go on vacation and rent another corvette I'll add that pic

That said the new truck is in good condition, got around 325k miles, much nicer on the inside, the only bad thing is it doesnt have that front mirror on the driver side and I sort of like having that mirror. Going in to sit downa nd talk with dispatcher today, then hopefully off to get a new load going back south where its warm geez its cold in Michigan. After they install my inverter anyway, they do that for free, up to 1500 watts. Woot!

 

Well we finally got our inverter installed, all the dash lights fixed, and our apu heater needs repair but the part will be out till next week. Oh well, don't plan to sit long enough to care lol. I do like their maintainence setup, you write everything out on a work order, then they go down the lsit and tell you what they did fix, what they needed parts on, and what they cannot fix per co rules. Sadly no spot driver mirror got installed, apparently they won't install aftermarket >.<

We got our next load, gotta go! Short on time, 600 miles needing to be there by 4 tomorrow! So far so good, met dispatcher today, seems like a nice guy!

 

Well the swap driver was 4 hours late, according to him he didnt get dispatch until it was 4 hours late. Either way, despite our best effort we could not make up that 4 hours as the load was literally scheduled with just enough time at ontime swap, BUT we delivered within one hour of delivery time. Its rather nice having a truck that isnt so castrated it cannot pull uphill, this kenworth will pull up hill without slowing down much at all. We can run around 70 mph with 38k in the box uphill. And... it gets around 8 mpg... freaky.

Being as we are low on funds, we elected to route around the toll roads, but couldn't route around the last one, and sheesh 4 exits and 20.00 each way then another 20 to cross the bridge. Soon as we were unloaded we had another load, already late to pickup because pickup was set for original delivery time, so we wound up another hour late for load 2. Dispatch actually said we did a great job considering what we had to work with and then dispatched us on a light load so we could get back on track, but alas, that load is 'missing' the shipper has no idea what load it is as they have no load going to the destination and we do not have the pickup number. So tonight we shall sit at the Petro and sleep I guess.

Monday + Tuesday + Wednesday = 1300 miles

Had this load worked out it would have been 2500 for Monday - Thursday. With our weekend load we are sitting at 2400 for the week. We were down all day Sunday and part of the day Monday because of needing to get assigned to our truck and getting it ready for the road.

 

Finally got the load dropped it as they had to redo delivery do to late pickup, got another load which is to be dropped tonight, and we pickup another load in the morning with a bunch of stops to deliver monday.

All in all for this week: 4300 miles

Not bad considering we were off all day Sunday, most of Monday, and most of Thursday.

So far everything is great here, our FM is absolutely the best guy to work with. The truck has some issues, it has alot of squeaks that drive me nuts when I try to sleep... I will hunt each and every squeaking and rattling thing down and throw it off the truck one by one...

Mechanically the truck is great, runs fine, runs at 70-71 MPH, which is a BLESSING on these tight loads. The inverter was installed by Gainey for FREE (1000 watts which we can upgrade to 1500 watts which is the maxx they allow). So we can run everything from a small microwave to a vaccumn without much issue.