If you’ve been seeing news this week and last from North of the border and wondering just what’s happening there with the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests, soon entering their third week in Canada, hear a long take on it all in today's edition of Overdrive Radio. Alberta, Canada-headquartered owner-operator Mike Murchison is not a direct participant in those protests but a clear-eyed watcher of what’s going on in Canadian trucking and society, generally speaking. He narrates his hauls and so ...
Feb 11, 2022•39 min
Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Ann Alexander in today's edition of Overdrive Radio talks about her Little Rock office's push this week in hopes of gathering leads into the 2006 murder of 19-year-old Tracy Owana Jones, who disappeared in November that year from a Little Rock area truck stop where she’d been a somewhat regular at the time attempting to collect magazine subscriptions. Jones was last seen on November 15, 2006, a Wednesday, at the Pilot Travel Center at the Galloway ex...
Feb 04, 2022•34 min
Pre-CDL prospective truck drivers as of February 7 will have to use either a private or for-hire training provider registered in FMCSA's new Training Provider Registry to receive likewise newly required training before taking the skills test to get their CDL. The implementation of the so-called Entry Level Driver Training regs follows nearly a decade of development, following rulemaking by committee years ago now with a wide array of trucking and training stakeholders with a seat at the table. C...
Jan 28, 2022•52 min
The Overdrive 2021 Owner-Operator of the Year, chosen among finalists in the program we partner with the Truckload Carriers Association to produce, is nothing if nothing multifaceted in his pursuits both inside and out of the cab of his 2016 Freightliner Coronado, the fifth tractor owned in his three-decade history behind the wheel. In this special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, talk a long walk with owner-operator Bryan Smith through his trucking beginnings after operating heavy equipm...
Jan 21, 2022•31 min
Serious question: How do you know when it's time to hang it up? I'm Paul Marhoefer, and I'll be your host for today's special edition of Overdrive Radio. I'm 62 now, and I keep catching myself devising an exit strategy from the life of a full-time trucker. After all, there's $1,500/month in rocking-chair money just waiting for me downtown at the Social Security office. There have been phone conferences with our CPA, as well as just a little too much screen time gawking over Youtube videos with t...
Jan 14, 2022•58 min
Early on in this Overdrive Radio edition showcasing trucker-songwriter "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer's new "Corn Belt Cafe" long-player, the Overdrive Extra contributor describes standing at the register of a roadside diner somewhere in Illinois on Labor Day in the early 1980s. "Right in front of the counter there was a worn spot in the linoleum," Marhoefer said, and "standing in the blackness of that worn spot in the linoleum ... was one of those moments where you’re surprised by a sense of bliss....
Jan 07, 2022•38 min
Happy New Year to all of you! For this final day of 2021, we've got a special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast to count down to 2022 with a run back through our most-listened-to episodes of the year. That'd be a final 14 -- plus a 3-hour pause, say -- for a lucky 17 of our 2021 editions of the podcast. We’re going to hear about the hours of service – particularly in the context of the COVID-19 emergency declaration and its hours waiver, now in place in some form for almost two years. We’ll...
Dec 31, 2021•54 min
The night of Friday, December 10, was a stressful one for legions of Americans across the mid-South as tornado sirens blared, with everybody and their brother no doubt gathered around whatever mess they might have, or not have, in their basements. Owner-operator Daniel Koors of Indiana was up late monitoring storms’ progress himself that night – as you’ll hear in today’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. Though the destruction to his South in Kentucky was readily apparent that night, the n...
Dec 23, 2021•24 min
Tim DeWitt is no short-term-minded person, as he says in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, charting how the small fleet owner’s begun to make good on on long-term goals of improving the conditions under which his now more than 30 driver employees operate. And: to continue to achieve solid profitability. He's doing it with his authority as DeWitt Transportation, based in Southern Illinois, and without owning a single trailer. In the podcast, lean more closely into DeWitt’s operation, detail...
Dec 17, 2021•40 min
From a songwriting session in early 2019 with Nashville-based John Allan Miller, Airgas company driver Guy Archer, based in Dayton, Ohio, determined to get back to Music City to continue work in songwriting later that same year. Yet a back injury derailed that plan, then COVID happened in 2020, and getting back into his truck after unloading one night Archer happened to hear an advertisement early in 2021 for the Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search. As many regular listeners will know,...
Dec 10, 2021•49 min
Small Fleet Champ Silver Creek Transportation’s leader Jason Cowan speaks earlier on in this edition of Overdrive Radio to what he sees as an essential challenge in the highly competitive trucking industry for small fleet owners looking to lead by example and balance that competition with a rising-tide-floats-all-boats kind of mentality. Trucking companies can do more, he said, do embrace cooperation amongst their kind, where it makes sense, to get the job done without hampering future opportuni...
Nov 29, 2021•46 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, we're taking time to engage with two independent car haulers – Indiana-based owner-operator David Bunting and Ellenwood, Georgia's Eric Turner, owner of small fleet Turner Transport, both of whom have mastered the niche in spite of current auto-market challenges. Those challenges were discussed in-depth with them and others in Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole's three-part deep dive into car hauling, which you can read via this ...
Nov 19, 2021•27 min
In this Veterans Day 2021 special edition of Overdrive Radio, we sat down with active-duty servicemember and small fleet owner Rob Ahlers, currently serving under the Chief of Logistics for the Pentagon out of D.C. With two military vets as partners, Ahlers launched the private MSR Transport Services with an intention to help fellow vets transition to civilian careers in trucking, and since the start in 2014 MSR's up to more than 30 power units, some owner-operated, hauling mostly expedited and ...
Nov 11, 2021•28 min
Helping carriers dealing with the 'fun' that can come with safety and compliance during federal or state audits is at least a good part of the life of Fleet Safety Services consultant Jeff Davis, the principal voice in this edition of Overdrive Radio. After starting in trucking as a driver, Davis eventually made a career helping mostly small motor carriers through those compliance reviews. At the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies this past week in Nashvill...
Nov 08, 2021•46 min
Ruben Cardenas is one of the haulers involved with the Plus company, among the scads of tech companies dipping their toes into freight hauling as they work on ever-more-technically-capable advanced driver assist systems. And Plus isn't shy about using marketing terminology like "self-driving" and "autonomous driving" to describe their systems. Cardenas speaks to his day-to-day on-highway testing of the Plus systems, helping refine system capabilities. The interview with Cardenas was conducted by...
Oct 29, 2021•31 min
Consider today's Overdrive Radio edition in the context of Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting on the intermodal niche released a week and a half back, and the system-wide backlogs being experienced all around the container-moving supply chains, particularly evident at the nation’s West Coast ports. The feature was another entry in our "Niche Hauls" series of features on freight segments where owner-ops are in high demand: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15279445/...
Oct 25, 2021•40 min
In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, a window on the narratives that emerged from the SHE Trucking Expo, where Overdrive Radio host and editor Todd Dills spent Day One of the conference speaking to attendees and organizers about goals of network-building within and outside of the minority-owned business community. Founded and spearheaded by Chattanooga-based longtime driver/owner-operator/SHE Trucking Facebook group founder Sharae Moore, the expo was not only diverse in terms of the backgr...
Oct 13, 2021•46 min
Heading up this Overdrive Radio special edition are the words and guitar of none other than Guy Archer, a professional driver with Airgas who’s on his way to Nashville early next month for the recording session that was the prize for his big win last month in the 2021 Overdrive/Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search. In this edition of the podcast we give the podcast listeners the pleasure of running through the three Talent Search finalists’ excellent entries into that competition, this year havin...
Oct 08, 2021•45 min
This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features an expansive discussion I had with longtime professional trucker Tom Kyrk about his involvement in the relatively new TNC Radio streaming station, gearing itself to speak directly to drivers -- predominantly but not entirely in trucking, as it were. As Kyrk tells, a sizable portion of the content tries to hit the intersection between pro four-wheeled drivers and all of you, Class 8 owners and drivers: https://tncradio.live/ Kyrk’s gotte...
Oct 01, 2021•38 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio features the voice of an owner-operator you may well recognize – Debbie Desiderato, now principally out of Virginia, and sometimes Long Island, New York. She's had quite a year a half or so, moving to sell her long-running and quite recognizable Kenworth in 2020 in a turn back to hotshot car hauling for a time, before she capitalized on opportunity hauling in support of logging operations around her Virginia base with a used purchase of a 2017 Western Star 4900. L...
Sep 24, 2021•29 min
Trucker Nation Director of Communications Andrea Marks is our guest for this edition of Overdrive Radio. Marks is no stranger to the regulatory process -- or the ins and out of running a small trucking business. She has livestock haulers in her family’s small fleet. She's sharing here what she sees as a golden opportunity for hours of service flexibility advocates lying in plain view, in the form of the COVID-19 emergency declaration, waiving regs for emergency relief haulers of particular commo...
Sep 16, 2021•40 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, hear the musical entries of, and interviews with, the three songwriters who are finalists in this year’s Overdrive Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search. It's something of a preview of the big finale, set for September 16, at 5 p.m. Eastern time, and streaming from OverdriveOnline.com. Find out just how to tune in live that date and sign up for email reminders just before the broadcast via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/...
Sep 02, 2021•36 min
Arguably the best-known and most-loved trucker movie is “Smokey and the Bandit,” and sharing that limelight is its signature song by Jerry Reed, “Eastbound and down.” The movie, released in 1977, came near the end of trucking’s pop-culture craze of the 1970s. It shared kinship with another movie about trucker rebellion: “Convoy.” That film was released in 1978, though the hit song of the same name that it was based on was released three years earlier. “Convoy,” even with its comedic moments, was...
Aug 30, 2021•8 min
At the 2021 Shell Rotella SuperRigs truck show in the Chicago area last month, Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole asked these five owners variations on a couple of central questions: 1. The first asked owners to look out into the future and forecast prospects and plans five years ahead, given the current market and business plans in place. 2. The other had all to do with technology –- alternative powertrains like the electric-drive trucks we’re seeing trickle into the short-haul market, natural-gas...
Aug 27, 2021•19 min
Looking at the landscape for commercial truck inspections, Pennsylvania-based former local-department officer and long-certified DOT inspector Andy Blair sees plenty missed opportunities when it comes to troopers helping truckers when it comes to knowledge of out-of-service violations. All too frequently, violations that put an owner-op or other driver out of service simply aren't explained at the point of inspection. Too many trucking companies large and small, furthermore, he knows, don't inve...
Aug 20, 2021•49 min
The thumbnail image with today's podcast was the product of the 2019 groundswell of grassroots advocacy that rose leading into the ultimate passage of the AB 5 law in California, which codified a controversial court decision that applied the ABC contractor test in the state. That test, to say the least, is problematic for owner-operator lease arrangements with motor carriers as they've traditionally been drawn up -- and federally recognized now for decades in the Truth in Leasing regulations. In...
Aug 13, 2021•41 min
It’s been decades since the influx of women into truck driving was considered news, at least among trucking media. But look long enough in the rear-view and you’ll reach a time when it was truly a novelty. One of the first – if not the very first – entertainers to use music to highlight that change was Kay Adams, with “Little Pink Mack.” Released in 1966, the song was written by Chris Roberts, Jim Thornton and Scott Turner. It wasn’t a strident feminist statement bucking the establishment in the...
Aug 09, 2021•4 min
For longtime Overdrive Radio listeners he will need no introduction whatsoever, but for the rest of you, the artist you'll hear straight away in this edition of the podcast is none other than Tony Justice. The Everhart Transportation driver, singer, songwriter and performer's recent history reaches back more than a decade now to the date of his first solo trucking-themed record, called "On the Road." This year, he’s out with his fifth, "18 Gears to Life." While Justice was in Nashville recently ...
Aug 06, 2021•30 min
Just more than a decade ago, owner-operator Don Wood was prepping a recently purchased 2003 Peterbilt 379 former fleet sleeper truck as a custom daycab. He was about to go hauling local hoping to meet his then-young children's home needs after years over the road. That wouldn't last more than a couple years itself before, though, Wood was back out on his own and, as customers leaned on him for their transport needs and drivers he knew needed work, he began to buy other trucks. He knew he had the...
Jul 30, 2021•31 min
The context for the conversation you'll hear in today's 60th-anniversary special edition of Overdrive Radio, conducted at the Great American Trucking Show in 2019, was twofold, centered around both driver training and history. Over the course of the 20th century, as you'll hear, the licensing required for a driver to operate interstate tightened. In the early days of motorized transport, an 18-year-old had no problem being licensed for interstate operation of what passed for the big trucks of th...
Jul 27, 2021•25 min
