What can you tell me about 3rd party Testing (state of Pa)...Wife asking here)..

Yeah if he fails the first time, he may have to pay truck rental and state test fees when he goes back to try again. Not any more training fees though.

 

Sounds like a one day training fee. I just finished school in ohio, and the retake fees were as follows

Retake pretrip, manuever, road test 85

Retake manuever, road test 65

Retake road test 45

If you pass pre trip, maneuver, but fail road, then you just have to retake road.
Pass pre trip, but fail maneuver, then have to take maneuver and road test. The test order is pretrip, then maneuver, then road test.

 

A railroad MOW truck?

Go get that B. Or better A. Get it. I totally was focused on non railroad stuff.

I happen to be a life long student of the railroad, once had a oppertunity to hire on with Uncle Pete for the path to Engineer which would have taken most of my remaining years then in those days.

 

This sounds like a simple problem with a simple solution.

You can learn all the things you need to know about air brakes on YouTube. Practice the air brakes test over and over again so that when the tester asks you to demonstrate, you can do it in your sleep. It's not that hard.

For the rest, there are Q&A sites tht offer free practice tests. This site has a section. Just get the state CDL handbook from your DMV, study it and take the tests over and over again until you are consistently scoring perfect or near-perfect numbers.

As far as the physical part of driving a Class B, anyone who's ever driven a motor home or a box truck can pretty much drive anything in the B class. It's not like a Class A where you basically are trying to control two vehicles (tractor and trailer) at the same time. For the most part you're just driving a very large straight truck. The hardest part might be learning to double-clutch and downshift, so find an automatic to practice and test on.

If he goes down to the DMV and just passes the tests, they will issue a learners permit, which he can use at work until he's comfortable about taking the road test. Most states have DMVs open on Saturday, so you can probably get that done on an off-day.

If he's serious about doing it, he could probably have the learners permit covered in a week, maybe less. After that, he'll have a certain amount of time (90-180 days) to pass the road test.

 

Ok.

Class A the trucking school is going to teach Class A.

I don't know of any trucking school stupid enough to restrict to Class B only. They want that Class A.

I guess you can go to school and lose the course material related to class A and just do B but... it's irregular.

Im not here to argue or make trouble Ive done that enough. But to me and my experience anyone who wanted Class A after passing the road test with the state got it. Not very many said they wanted just B.

 

Do not let those people rattle on the ######## speeches. Tell em off you dont wanna hear the lies and sparkle, you want specific answers to the questions you ask. If you don't get them, hang up.