It's been quite a while since the Overdrive Radio podcast has attempted to capture the vast dynamism of a trucking show quite like the one that took place for the first time in three years in Kentucky last week -- that's the Mid-America Trucking Show, MATS for short, of course. It'll be quite some time before we convey the full breadth of everything encountered there, but for today on this April Fool's Day edition of the Overdrive Radio we'll get to two aspects: first with the voice of a brand-new podcast, none other than a longtime operator now operating a custom trucking video company, James "Tex" Crowley, out now with the intro episode of 'The Big Road' you can hear in full in today's edition. The show is inspired in part by his career behind the wheel, and a real passion for trucking, generally, as you'll hear.

Before we get there, though, a look at one among scads of new Transportation Management Systems geared toward the smallest of carriers popping up around the trucking technology landscape: the Lynks TMS is targeted not only to small carriers but to shippers and brokers as well as a way to grease the skids for dispatch management, invoicing for collections, management of supporting documents out on the road for drivers utilizing the associated Lynks app, and more. It's live commercially as of today, April 1, and it joins a growing subset of the big TMS software market, including the recent Command system from the Trucker Path company, among many others that are geared toward speeding up the digital handoff between carriers and their customers, and operators in the field.

There’s utility there, as Lynks' George Thellman explains, for one-truck independents, and particularly those who want to set themselves up with back-office tools as they grow beyond that one truck.

The Lynks TMS: https://lynks2go.com/

James Crowley's Texas Media Foundry website: https://www.thetexasmediafoundry.com/