Overdrive Radio

Fredrick "Choice M.A.S." Claxton of New York caught the trucking bug on a two-wheeled cross-country tour on a Suzuki street bike, no less. His friends told him he was crazy at the time, as he notes some truckers will now for a preference for the challenge, for instance, of crowded I-95 in the Northeast, or the curves and ups and downs of Rocky Mountain roads out West. He set his mind to making a move, after that big cross-country trip, from work with one of most recognizable names in apparel to where he eventually landed today, three years and some months later, with small fleet I-65 Transport, based in Indiana. He runs with a flatbed behind him in a Peterbilt, and has his sights set on a future in trucking, and bringing others along with him in success. Hear more in this Overdrive Radio edition, too, and his and colleagues' Truckers Feeding the Homeless support initiative, with another outreach event planned for July in Baltimore. Read more about the organization's past efforts viahttps://www.overdriveonline.com/truckers-feeding-the-homeless-delivered-to-600-plus-in-dallas/

Fredrick "Choice M.A.S." Claxton of New York caught the trucking bug on a two-wheeled cross-country tour on a Suzuki street bike, no less. His friends told him he was crazy at the time, as he notes some truckers will now for a preference for the challenge, for instance, of crowded I-95 in the Northeast, or the curves and ups and downs of Rocky Mountain roads out West. He set his mind to making a move, after that big cross-country trip, from work with one of most recognizable names in apparel to where he eventually landed today, three years and some months later, with small fleet I-65 Transport, based in Indiana. He runs with a flatbed behind him in a Peterbilt, and has his sights set on a future in trucking, and bringing others along with him in success. Hear more in this Overdrive Radio edition, too, and his and colleagues' Truckers Feeding the Homeless support initiative, with another outreach event planned for July in Baltimore. Read more about the organization's past efforts viahttps://www.overdriveonline.com/truckers-feeding-the-homeless-delivered-to-600-plus-in-dallas/

Yes, we've heard from the off-the-record sources, too. With the training rule delay set to be made official any day now, operator Scott Hainline of Illinois notes he's just as hopeful as other operators for real safety improvement with training practices standardization –- at least when it comes to raising the bar for minimum standards. His perspective is interesting because he was initially trained back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As with so many owner-operators starting out during that time and even up through the present day in some cases, Hainline learned through an informal apprenticeship with a fuel hauler in his area, which you’ll hear more about in the conversation that follows here. By the early 1990s, though, he’d left trucking behind for a career in law enforcement, retiring just several years ago, whereupon he decided to re-enter trucking. What he found upon retraining for his CDL with a community-college program, though, he felt lacked in several different areas, and looking around his state he’s seen the wide variability in how different CDL-training programs approach the basics. Our conversation touches on all of that, likewise what opportunity may exist for formalizing the one-on-one CDL apprenticeships of yesteryear in the at-some-point coming required training regime, where both coursework and range and road training minimum standards must be met before a learner’s permit holder can take their CDL skills test. (Pictured: Hainline in the mid-1970s as a teenager.)

Yes, we've heard from the off-the-record sources, too. With the training rule delay set to be made official any day now, operator Scott Hainline of Illinois notes he's just as hopeful as other operators for real safety improvement with training practices standardization –- at least when it comes to raising the bar for minimum standards. His perspective is interesting because he was initially trained back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As with so many owner-operators starting out during that time and even up through the present day in some cases, Hainline learned through an informal apprenticeship with a fuel hauler in his area, which you’ll hear more about in the conversation that follows here. By the early 1990s, though, he’d left trucking behind for a career in law enforcement, retiring just several years ago, whereupon he decided to re-enter trucking. What he found upon retraining for his CDL with a community-college program, though, he felt lacked in several different areas, and looking around his state he’s seen the wide variability in how different CDL-training programs approach the basics. Our conversation touches on all of that, likewise what opportunity may exist for formalizing the one-on-one CDL apprenticeships of yesteryear in the at-some-point coming required training regime, where both coursework and range and road training minimum standards must be met before a learner’s permit holder can take their CDL skills test. (Pictured: Hainline in the mid-1970s as a teenager.)

in this edition of Overdrive Radio we’re talking music, and the Capitol Christmas Tree haul, and a recording session that happened November 23 in Nashville. Kingsport, Tenn.-based owner-operator Taylor Barker won this year’s edition of Overdrive’s own Trucker Talent Search, held annually at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas. Part of the prize for the big win is a recording session at Jay’s Place in Nashville on Music Row, with longtime producer-engineer and session player himself Jay Vernali. “It's Saturday night on Music Row,” as Jay set the scene -- where the magic happens, as it were. A window here into Taylor Barker's history in music and trucking, and the singer-songwriter's plans for the recording. Also: Brumbach Stephens on his experience piloting the final third of the haul of this Capitol Christmas Tree in a specially wrapped KW W990. Brumbach, a former small fleet owner-operator now principally in sales with Wilbanks Trucking, spelled out some of the details of his and others’ piloting of the tree clear across the nation, making stops along the way. We caught up with him a week ago at the stop outside the Bridgestone Arena here in Nashville. Songwriter Lindsay Lawler and a crew of Nashville local songwriters entertained the assembled with a bevy of Christmas songs, as you’ll hear.

in this edition of Overdrive Radio we’re talking music, and the Capitol Christmas Tree haul, and a recording session that happened November 23 in Nashville. Kingsport, Tenn.-based owner-operator Taylor Barker won this year’s edition of Overdrive’s own Trucker Talent Search, held annually at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas. Part of the prize for the big win is a recording session at Jay’s Place in Nashville on Music Row, with longtime producer-engineer and session player himself Jay Vernali. “It's Saturday night on Music Row,” as Jay set the scene -- where the magic happens, as it were. A window here into Taylor Barker's history in music and trucking, and the singer-songwriter's plans for the recording. Also: Brumbach Stephens on his experience piloting the final third of the haul of this Capitol Christmas Tree in a specially wrapped KW W990. Brumbach, a former small fleet owner-operator now principally in sales with Wilbanks Trucking, spelled out some of the details of his and others’ piloting of the tree clear across the nation, making stops along the way. We caught up with him a week ago at the stop outside the Bridgestone Arena here in Nashville. Songwriter Lindsay Lawler and a crew of Nashville local songwriters entertained the assembled with a bevy of Christmas songs, as you’ll hear.

As Michigan-based small fleet owner Leander Richmond said in the last edition of Overdrive Radio. No, it doesn’t happen to drivers of cars, it does not happen to campers – it does, often enough, happen to truckers. He was talking about the phenomenon of private-lot or other booting of trucks in which drivers are sleeping, most often during federally mandated rest periods, of course. As so many of you likely saw last week with a report from a Dandridge, Tenn., Speedway fuel-stop location, that can include tow trucks hooked up to you while you rest, with a fee required to unhook. Richmond, as he noted in the last podcast, believes there should be a prohibition on booting or hooking to an occupied vehicle in this manner, and it’s a subject we’ll be covering in more depth in a later issue of Overdrive. For now, in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast some sound piece of advice before parking in any spot where you have doubt about the possibility of a tow-hook or boot in your future. And that is, if at an open location with any no-parking sign within eyesight –- do the reasonable thing and get out and ask a question in-store before you make a $300 or more costly mistake. That only works to an extent, of course. ... Some cases here where it most definitely didn't. And: Accounts from the one-truck businesses of Bryan Hutchens, Ruben Carrion, and Kit Spanfellner from That's a Big 10-4 on D.C. last month.

As Michigan-based small fleet owner Leander Richmond said in the last edition of Overdrive Radio. No, it doesn’t happen to drivers of cars, it does not happen to campers – it does, often enough, happen to truckers. He was talking about the phenomenon of private-lot or other booting of trucks in which drivers are sleeping, most often during federally mandated rest periods, of course. As so many of you likely saw last week with a report from a Dandridge, Tenn., Speedway fuel-stop location, that can include tow trucks hooked up to you while you rest, with a fee required to unhook. Richmond, as he noted in the last podcast, believes there should be a prohibition on booting or hooking to an occupied vehicle in this manner, and it’s a subject we’ll be covering in more depth in a later issue of Overdrive. For now, in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast some sound piece of advice before parking in any spot where you have doubt about the possibility of a tow-hook or boot in your future. And that is, if at an open location with any no-parking sign within eyesight –- do the reasonable thing and get out and ask a question in-store before you make a $300 or more costly mistake. That only works to an extent, of course. ... Some cases here where it most definitely didn't. And: Accounts from the one-truck businesses of Bryan Hutchens, Ruben Carrion, and Kit Spanfellner from That's a Big 10-4 on D.C. last month.

Small fleet owner Leander Richmond's efforts to fight the egregious practice of booting trucks when drivers are asleep in the bunk have been written about before -- he's been successful when booters violate local ordinances that govern their businesses, or in one recent case he details here didn’t even have a contract with a particular property owner to be doing what he was doing on the property. Local and/or state laws around booting and towing vary considerably, as he’s most certainly found in his efforts to raise awareness among truckers and law enforcement about the more predatory boots in that business. Here, what he sees as a possible solution to a problem exacerbated by the ELD mandate and its parking-related ripple effects along all manner of routes around the nation. Picture of Richmond here by Denise Marhoefer.

Also in the podcast: A window into one of the conversations with participants in "That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C.," which happened early last month on the National Mall in Washington. This talk introduces a little bit of the history, stretching back into the 1980s, and the long development of the business of independent Germann Soeth, of Frederick, Maryland.

Small fleet owner Leander Richmond's efforts to fight the egregious practice of booting trucks when drivers are asleep in the bunk have been written about before -- he's been successful when booters violate local ordinances that govern their businesses, or in one recent case he details here didn’t even have a contract with a particular property owner to be doing what he was doing on the property. Local and/or state laws around booting and towing vary considerably, as he’s most certainly found in his efforts to raise awareness among truckers and law enforcement about the more predatory boots in that business. Here, what he sees as a possible solution to a problem exacerbated by the ELD mandate and its parking-related ripple effects along all manner of routes around the nation. Picture of Richmond here by Denise Marhoefer.

Also in the podcast: A window into one of the conversations with participants in "That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C.," which happened early last month on the National Mall in Washington. This talk introduces a little bit of the history, stretching back into the 1980s, and the long development of the business of independent Germann Soeth, of Frederick, Maryland.