Overdrive Radio's rebroadcast of the Trucking Solutions Group's "accident-awareness" conference call, with interviews about the impetus for the event with owner-ops Vince Crisanti and Shane Rizzuto. Both operators were motivated in part by personal experience with crashes on the roadways, and hopeful that "anyone who touches a seatbelt" could benefit from the input of firefighter, police and water rescue first-responders who presented. Also: Resources for dealing with the personal aftermath of a...
Sep 16, 2019•58 min
Something a little different on Overdrive Radio today – the podcast will transport you like so many futuristic teleporting time machines to a Thursday, Aug. 22, panel at the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas. That panel was all about the notion of a “driverless” truck and where drivers really fit in as such a thing gets closer to real. Find a brief contemporaneous report from the panel, a discussion with Starsky Robotics' Paul Schlegel and Pronto's Ognen Stojanovski, via this link: https://...
Sep 06, 2019•39 min
In this Overdrive Radio podcast edition, run through the performances by competing truckers Jason Henley, "Mississippi Ken" Freeman and the ultimate talent search winner, Taylor Barker, live from the Great American Trucking Show a week ago. Also: A warm-up three-song act by Paul Marhoefer and Tony Justice's homespun emcee-ing of the event, an ongoing anchor among the community of musicians who also happened to haul freight on the open road, or vice versa, as it were. Thirdly: Near the top, a bri...
Aug 29, 2019•45 min
If you missed the Great American Trucking Show or the FMCSA's webcast last week, you can sit in on the first hour and more of the hours of service listening session held at GATS in Dallas Aug. 23, 2019, via this special presentation of Overdrive Radio. This was the first listening session held by the FMCSA following its introduction of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that offered some changes to truckers aimed at increasing both safety and some measure of flexibility for drivers. Two significant...
Aug 28, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Wednesday night in Dallas, classic country star and gospel singer Leon Everette, with trucker-songwriter Bill Weaver, started us up with a sound-check of sorts that turned into an impromptu extended jam -- you'll hear some of that and more in this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. (Paul Marhoefer, too.) And though the news has been dominated this week and the previous one by the hours of service, we sit down at GATS for a chat about history, training and more with Jay Thompson of Tr...
Aug 24, 2019•53 min
Readers weigh in largely favorably on FMCSA's this-week-proposed hours of service changes. Any of these changes have quite an interesting road ahead of them in the next year or however long it takes for the agency to push them through. So-called "safety advocates" are already howling to mainstream news outlets -– stories are being spread far and wide with editorialized headlines like “Trump administration moves to relax rules on how long truckers can drive”… You may have seen that one or some va...
Aug 16, 2019•18 min
What would you do for another mile or two per gallon in running fuel mileage? How does a six-year odyssey in modifications to your truck’s engine and related systems, reducing the draw on the engine from the main fan and A/C and more sound? That’s in essence what thinker-tinker, so to speak, inventor, and independent owner-operator Kenny Capell did. Based in East Tennessee, Kenny continues to modify his own Freightliner Columbia and Detroit to get to the point where not only is he achieving abou...
Aug 07, 2019•31 min
Up from water: This week's Overdrive Radio podcast edition features the voices of six current longtime staff of the Nashville downtown TravelCenters of America location. It’s certainly a unique stop with its proximity to the city center, likewise just a few city blocks' worth of distance from the banks of the mighty Cumberland River. TA Nashville’s continued existence at its now 40-year location is remarkable further for what happened nine years ago this past May, when over the weekend of May 1-...
Jul 30, 2019•35 min
You’ll be hard-pressed to come across cooler heads than those of the husband-wife team pair of relative trucking newbies I had the pleasure of sitting down with in Hartsville, Tenn., several weeks back. Tommy and Linda Bryant have about a year over the road as a company team with Old Time Express, pulling a dry van and, generally, loving life together after their mid-life switch to the work. For this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, we drop into Hartsville Old Time office, where I met the Brya...
Jul 19, 2019•23 min
Dispatch here from the day the truck stop came to the U.S. Congress with Truckstop.com’s Chief Relationship Officer Brent Hutto. Hutto testitifed recently before a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee about the position of technology providers in the freight ecosystem, the potential for electronic permitting, the importance of funding road maintenance and more. Regarding the latter, his thoughts here include illustration of just how road deterioration makes the No. 1 reason owner-ops go...
Jul 11, 2019•44 min
Owner-operator Ingrid Brown started trucking as a teenager in 1979, and she's been on the road since. In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast: Her reflections on her 40-year career, many of those spent as a single-truck owner-operator, as well as her recent involvement in FMCSA's Our Roads, Our Safety campaign and her ongoing bout with various forms of skin cancer. Also — a listen to the three songs that earned three truckers finalists spots in this year's Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker ...
Jun 28, 2019•34 min
So says retired trucker Joe Jolly out of Kansas, who was recently treated for a small spot of aggressive skin cancer on his face. He has a message for young drivers who aren't thinking about their in-cab sun exposure. Put fairly succinctly, you might say the sun is “trying to kill you” from the day you’re born, as Joe puts it. Anything you can do to protect yourself from damaging ultraviolet radiation while trucking over the road today will pay dividends in later years. We talk about that throug...
Jun 13, 2019•24 min
Ride along with Overdrive Senior Editor Todd Dills and Nashville singer-songwriter Boo Ray on a tour through Ray's latest, named after a familiar site on I-24 anyone who's run west from Chattanooga will recognize. The record starts with a trio of road songs in which there's no shortage of mirth, pathos and more.
May 30, 2019•38 min
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we get a clear window onto the fist Make-A-Wish convoy from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with former trucker George Ruelens. He was hauling for Ned Bard & Son at the time, with no idea what he and the 41 other truckers were doing that day would go on to become a veritable institution in the region around Lancaster County -- the annual Mother’s Day convoy benefiting the Make-a-Wish foundation. This year, the convoy featured 650 trucks in its ...
May 24, 2019•32 min
South Carolina-based owner-operator Lee Epling echoes retired veteran hauler Gordon Alkire's perspective in the previous edition of Overdrive Radio, in which Alkire spoke on the tragic Colorado crash several weeks back. Epling, in turn, likewise urged caution pointing the finger before all the facts are known. Along the way, Epling shares his own brake-failure story on Sandstone Mountain in W.Va./Va. on I-64. Further, we talk with OOIDA board member Monte Wiederhold about what turned out to be a...
May 13, 2019•34 min
A week ago Thursday began no doubt no shortage of investigation into the fiery Lakewood, Colorado, crash of Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, who lost control of his truck on a downhill grade and, ultimately, crashed, killing multiple people and sending multiple others to the hospital. In the wake of the tragedy for all involved, including the driver, who was charged with vehicular homicide among other counts, there’s been no small amount of finger-pointing to this or that cause. Gordon Alkire, ret...
May 03, 2019•30 min
If regular listeners don’t recognize the first voice you hear in this podcast, that of Daniel Snow, he and his wife and business partner Phyllis' rig you're certain you'll remember. Christened “The Goose,” it’s a 1996 Freightliner Classic with 140 inches’ worth of a custom-redesigned ICT sleeper the Snows located and outfitted themselves for the comforts of home on the road about 7 years ago. Another project undertaken around the same time is a four-foot storage compartment they built into the f...
Apr 26, 2019•28 min
Learn from the mistakes of others, because you can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself. Bill Ater’s words to live by. in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast we drop into the scene at the Junction truckstop in Blunt, S.D., round about mid-week last week, with the Landstar-leased owner-operator and a fellow hauler on a run from Midland, Texas, up to the Williston, N.D., oil fields. The two found themselves just ahead of the early-Spring blizzard that hammered the area and...
Apr 17, 2019•32 min
An unfortunate reality in the 2018 year-end income averages from ATBS showed independent owner-operators with their authority earning on average less than some leased owner-op segments. In Kevin Rutherford's view, that just shouldn’t be the case for any full-time independent given the old greater risk equals greater reward truism. If you’re not beating the leased averages and are working full-time or more, something is terribly wrong. Find more on the numbers that explains those averages via Ove...
Apr 12, 2019•25 min
Today on Overdrive Radio, much of a conversation I had with former owner-operator Scott Grenerth, with whom regular listeners will be familiar from his moderation of our parking-issues-related panel at the Great American Trucking Show in August 2018. Grenerth’s currently with the Truck Specialized Parking Services company and is a former regulatory affairs director with OOIDA. At Mid-America last week, his company introduced a new parking-related resource in RigRest.com, a mobile-optimized searc...
Apr 05, 2019•24 min
This edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast comes as the Mid-America Trucking Show continues in Louisville, Ky. In this edition, a couple of my conversations with two owner-ops with some commonality between them in a willingness to be the contrarian in this loud age, on a variety of things. That’d be Lexington, Kentucky-based owner-op Chad Boblett, running with one truck and using brokers. Likewise the operator you'll hear at the podcast's top, Henry Albert, who moves truck parts between Laredo ...
Mar 29, 2019•24 min
Mandi Jo Pinheiro, the winner of the 2018 Trucker Talent Search, and her father and fellow guitarist, Urban Roger Brown, were kind enough to sit down with Overdrive in Nashville earlier this week. They'd come all the way from Idaho Tuesday for an all-day Wednesday recording session at Jay’s Place, a studio long operated by Jay Vernali on Music Row. Conveniently, Vernali also offers up the apartment above the studio to travelers, and it was there that Pinheiro and Brown ran through a couple of th...
Mar 22, 2019•32 min
In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, following last week's talk with Load One's John Elliott about significant challenges in the cargo-van-powered segment of the expedited trucking niche, owner-operator Darren Ayres details his own place within it hauling in a Mercedes Sprinter Van. He and his co-owner-op wife, Trish, run leased to Landstar and with (as suggested by the podcast's title) a sizable sleeper area as an on-the-road living quarters in the mostly military-freight-spec...
Mar 14, 2019•25 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio find Max Heine's talk with owner-operator John Strong, recently off the road, about his involvement in the 1970s and beyond in advocacy efforts with Overdrive founder Mike Parkhurst, memories of the Mass 10 truck stop, and much more. Todd Dills' talk with Load One head John Elliott continues here, too, about the cargo van niche, which would seem to check the boxes as a solution to a lot of the headaches -- hours of service, scales, parking -- Class 8 tractor-tr...
Mar 08, 2019•26 min
Owner-operator Brian Bucenell's 2002 Peterbilt 379 was among the 100 or so trucks that participated in the "slow roll" event in Indianapolis last week. Bucenell's also helping put on a Virginia "slow roll" event tomorrow, March 2, with a gathering point in Doswell, Va. (The group plans to roll out from the Doswell truck stop on I-95 at 11 a.m.) Slow roll events follow in Ohio on March 8 and in the Carolinas around Charlotte on March 9. Bucenell -- pictured with his daughter, Savannah, and wife, ...
Mar 01, 2019•31 min
And, as the picture shows, more from Long Haul Paul Marhoefer from the stage at the Key Palace Theater in Redkey, Ind., this past Feb. 2. Otherwise, this edition of Overdrive Radio takes aim at combating increasingly proliferating online scams. High degrees of situational awareness are your best tools, says Safr.me consultant and author Robert Siciliano, who speaks here. Some such cases have seen the light of day at OverdriveOnline.com, including the recent dramatic and expensive tale of a Georg...
Feb 21, 2019•52 min
There are a multiplicity of smartphone apps out there for leased owner-ops from their leasing carriers, but we hadn’t seen anything quite like the "Ultimate Advantage" app from expediter Load One before we first wrote about it this time last year. In the sort of emergency-freight service that is the expedited trucking business, having information about where to be to best set yourself up for the next load is, to say the least, a difficult proposition. Long waits between loads have been common th...
Feb 15, 2019•24 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor James Jaillet's conversation with Northeastern University academic Alex Scott, who with colleagues at Michigan State and the University of Arkansas completed a recent study around potential safety-sensitive impacts of the electronic-logging-device mandate. The upshot, which you know if you saw the headlines, is that a comparative analysis of various carrier size groups, average weekly crash volumes, and hours of service violations,...
Feb 08, 2019•40 min
This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features a talk with small fleet owner Dave Marti of Forrest, Ill. He's got six power units, including his own, leased to Transport Services of Sullivan, Ill., hauling fuel in the region around his home base, delivering in liquid-bulk hazmat tanks to fueling stations that see an uptick in volume this time of year. His is one of not many trucking niches that actually see a boost in business this time of year, though as you’ll hear, costs are high...
Feb 01, 2019•28 min
Today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features a long talk on subject matter in the headline, and more, with owner-operator Steve Bixler of Valley View, Pa., the relatively recently former OOIDA board member and hauler of sand to natural gas drilling and fracking operations in his region. He resigned from OOIDA board in 2017 amid business issues at that time, and today, he’s working with an intrastate log and wood-chips hauling operation that uses its company trucks in Pennnsylvania. In...
Jan 25, 2019•32 min
