Atlanta-based Rico Muhammad regulat listeners may well recall from past Overdrive Radio editions covering a variety of issues, from electronic logging device choices ahead of the mandate back in 2017 to a variety of other business topics. Muhammad's also the host of a weekly audio program in the Rate & Lanes podcast available via http://BlogTalkRadio.com/rates. In this week's Overdrive Radio, Muhammad speaks to the movement that's gathered steam nationally in response to killing of George Fl...
Jun 25, 2020•41 min
What does East Coast Transport Vice President of Logistics Paul Berman think about all the talk around potentially new requirements for freight-transaction transparency, and the existing regs? That was, after all, partly the question Berman joined me for this two-part edition of Overdrive Radio to answer to begin with. The answer is complicated, and involves honest questioning of the utility of after-the-load rate transparency for any owner-operator and more. What's not so complicated is Berman'...
Jun 03, 2020•31 min
View from the broker, Part 1. East Coast Transport's logistics VP Paul Berman has been around trucking, and particularly the food-freight side of things, since the 1970s and also happens to be a former owner-operator himself. He sat down with Overdrive Radio for an expansive talk on the history of brokerage in trucking and the evolution of the spot market into a sort of market-within-a-market, with plenty of downsides when pursued to the exclusion of tried-and-true strategies toward business rel...
May 29, 2020•31 min
A longer talk here with Maryland-headquartered Ed Miller, now retired from trucking and the author of a memoir called “A Trucker’s Tale: Wit, Wisdom and True Stories from 60 Years on the Road.” It’s an intimate portrait of a life lived in trucking, from a kid in Western North Carolina changing tires for his father and grandfather’s trucking company, to the driver’s seat himself stateside and in Vietnam as a Navy Seabee, to managing shipper relationships and/or operation back in this or that truc...
May 26, 2020•40 min
This edition features a talk with Generations Express independent owner-operator Bryan Hutchens, and we’ll get to how he feels about the hours of service changes released just yesterday and set to go into effect es early as September. Regular listeners and Overdrive readers may well remember Hutchens from an organizing role he assumed with others around last year’s That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C. outreach effort on the National Mall in October. The last couple of months, he’s seen business slow down a...
May 15, 2020•34 min
Owner-operators Daniel and Phyllis Snow have been off the road refusing to run at a loss for going on a month now as rates and available freight volumes have fallen. The crisis spurred by the COVID-19 coronavirus' spread, though, comes after a rough year of its own. To put everything in context, Daniel says, on the same miles run in 2019, the Snows were able to gross only around 60 percent of revenue they brought in 2013. Market deterioration has been the rule the past year, and they're not the ...
May 01, 2020•28 min
Questionable offer of easy money 'without asking for any business equity' by Overdrive
Apr 24, 2020•27 sec
In what has been perhaps the toughest week for trucking as an owner-operator in the last decade, this edition of Overdrive Radio offers some diversion via an interview with Haley Fohr of Chicago-based "Jackie Lynn," whose new record proceeds from a conception of the character for whom the band is named as a long-hauler with a particularly spectacular rig -- a mirrored vessel that carries the weight of the world it inhabits. The record, called "Jacqueline," is the group's second, among Fohr's oth...
Apr 17, 2020•35 min
Nearing the end of the first week of the SBA disaster-assistance loan programs available to owner-operators, insight in this Overdrive Radio edition from longtime owner-operator and now trucking-business coach Gary Buchs. In a time like this, look ahead to the relationships that you need to establish -- whether with a health-care provider, a broker or shipper customer, and indeed as Buchs suggests, a bank … those relationships you’ll need to be able to leverage when times get tough again. If you...
Apr 10, 2020•34 min
Special thanks to 13-year-old Logan Miller in this April Fool's Day edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, no kidding. Miller is the young man I wrote a little about on Friday, who's been serving sack lunches in appreciation of professional drivers at the I-79 rest area in West Virginia, southbound side just inside the Pennsylvania state line. Logan Miller has partnered on an "Orange Ribbon Campaign" with the folks at Trucks With Room to Spare, and attempt to promote the use of orange ribbons b...
Apr 01, 2020•18 min
Three examples of a new intensity of appreciation not only of professional drivers amid the COVID-19 crisis, but also from the professionals for those out there on the road with them in support, from fuel desk personnel to sanitary workers and so many more. Interviews: Ingrid Brown on hauling produce in and out of Hunt's Pont. Paul Marhoefer narrates the first two weeks' worth of the virus spread and the hoarding that's come with it.
Mar 25, 2020•44 min
Owner-operator Chad Fowler's "Solar Peterbilt" 1996 379 springs from a motivation more owner-operators are acting on with the increasing availability of relatively affordable solar panels, whether like Fowler's of the type built for stationary use or the more flexible variety built for mobile application. A look on his mostly maintenance-free power system (a big step forward from diesel APU-type power, Fowler believes, in that respect) and a message of appreciation from a purchasing and receivin...
Mar 13, 2020•14 min
Speaking to a gathering of the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association last week in Charlotte, N.C., while digging in on a view that the ELD mandate is a safety-positive rule, FMCSA Acting Administrator Jim Mullen made it clear he believed the flawed rigidity of the hours rules needed significant modification for drivers, and trumpeted the agency's efforts to promote the true safety-plus image of trucking as we know it. Such efforts could help stem the tide of so-called "nuclear verdicts"...
Feb 25, 2020•35 min
Let’s hear it for the self-described "door-swinger," everybody. That’d be current reefer hauler and former and still sometime step-decker and flatbedder Rob Goodwin, based up in the Texas panhandle and today running leased to a very small carrier. We'll hear how he got there, following some years running a small fleet with his authority, a run-in with a bad broker that cost him well north of 10 grand, and plenty business recalibration back to a one-truck affair. The last two years, too, he's fou...
Feb 12, 2020•31 min
The voice of trucker Scott Carlson dominates this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, detailing a little piece of equipment he’s got in his truck, as do the rest of the trucks in the fleet he's driven for for 17 years out of New York state. This little device, he knows, likely saved his life last week. The equipment? A simple carbon monoxide detector. An exhaust leak from his diesel-powered APU happened to have broken in the exact wrong spot, just below a vent for fresh cab air. Fortu...
Jan 31, 2020•19 min
It wasn't a result of the kind of accident we most think about when it comes to hauling freight on the highways -- rather, it involved a set of monster trucks then-owner-operator Lonnie Laurie ran in rallies, the "Michigan Ice Monster" and "Neighborhood Nightmare," as they were known. Airing up a flat on one of them after an event Memorial Day weekend in 1994, the worst happened, as you'll hear him tell the story in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio. Periodically now, he says, "some people ...
Jan 24, 2020•33 min
The notion in the title of this podcast is, at least, the goal of Western Flyer Express founder Rodney Timms, based in Oklahoma and also the founder of the All Truckers Together Against Child Abuse org. In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, find Timms' impassioned plea to the trucking community to join his effort in pursuit of victories large and small in a fight against child abuse, which is ultimately quite personal for him. As Christenson-leased owner-operator and regular Overdrive Extra...
Jan 15, 2020•19 min
As with advancing driver-assist techs in chaotic on-highway situations and wild weather, perhaps, the real world intrudes on podcast recordings, too. While I spoke with Walkabout Transport independent Debbie Desiderato about her brief appearance in a documentary film on, and her skepticism about, the advancements in driver assist technologies, her dog Bubba was startled by a deer or other animal near the Virginia home she keeps today. Hear him bark toward the tail end of the audio, where we also...
Jan 07, 2020•32 min
Let’s get ready to say goodbye to 2019 on the Overdrive Radio podcast. Christmas is in the books and, soon, so will be the year, so we’re taking a trip down memory lane via the top 10 most-listened-to episodes of Overdrive Radio this year, with some honorable mentions, too, covering a boatload of ground all told: From trucking history to shutdowns and slow rolls, parking and booting, the ELD mandate and hours of service, small fleet business, working the spot market and so much more ... Bonus at...
Dec 27, 2019•1 hr 6 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, listener Regi Rinear wonders at the risk for a company or leased operator of running with paper logs when ELDs are required, with little assurance that support personnel had done what was necessary to, if ultimately needed, extend the eight-day period FMCSA gives any carrier and/or driver experiencing an ELD malfunction. Herein: How to get that grace-period extension. Also: More on the Entry Level Training Rule and its likely delay with operator Scott Hainline...
Dec 20, 2019•19 min
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 ...
Dec 13, 2019•20 min
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 ...
Dec 06, 2019•28 min
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 Ve...
Nov 28, 2019•37 min
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 ca...
Nov 21, 2019•29 min
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...
Nov 08, 2019•26 min
Thanks to the Tompkins Square record label and the man behind the voice you hear in the song at the top here, Will Beeley. Beeley's new “Highways and Heart Attacks” record is the singer-songwriter and hazmat pressurized tank hauler's third. Today, Beeley lives in New Mexico, with roots in Texas. His story in music reaches back to his youth in the late 1960s, runs through an iconic record label in Jackson, Mississippi and extends on up into the present day, with his new record following 40 years ...
Oct 29, 2019•57 min
There's a new record forthcoming for 2016 Trucker Talent Search winning singer-songwriter Jason Lee Wilson, due in the new year. It's dubbed, simply, "Tennessee," and it's title track is an appreciation of home for the East Tennessee resident. He performed it as part of a three-song set at The Caverns venue in Pelham, Tenn., current home of the Bluegrass Underground television program -- you can hear it, and hear more about just where the song and the album are coming from, in today's edition of...
Oct 18, 2019•36 min
Pam Wilson hired on with Utah-based large fleet C.R. England about a year ago as vice president of process development. That’s something of a fancy way of saying she was brought in with hopes of improving parts of the company that support those who make the it tick – that’s truck drivers, of course. At the time of Wilson’s hiring, as Aaron Huff wrote in Overdrive sister fleet publication CCJ earlier this year, among the large number of company-employed drivers that make up the over-the-road divi...
Oct 10, 2019•40 min
There's been more chatter about the old "two-check" system of pay for owner-operators contracted to carriers in the last year and more as fleets of all shapes and sizes in California or with California-based independent contractor owner-ops ponder what approach to take to preserve relationships with business relationships with owner-ops in the wake of the state's codification of the so-called "ABC" independent contractor classification test. California's newly passed bill establishes that test a...
Oct 02, 2019•30 min
The need for greater parking capacity, well-managed, throughout the nation is no secret. The need along Texas lanes was the subject of the lively discussion Overdrive held at the Great American Trucking Show last month, devoted to parking. In today’s podcast, you’ll get a full window into that discussion, aimed at engaging with Texas DOT freight planning branch manager Sherry Pifer and others from the agency as they re-evaluate their own approach to marshalling public resources and create partne...
Sep 20, 2019•1 hr
