CoalJockey wrote: ↑Sun. Jun. 17, 2018 9:37 am
I will try not to hijack the thread here but it was already going this direction.
The ELD law has just begun to force the older, more experienced drivers into retirement that otherwise would have continued to drive for a few more years. I don’t know if it is so much a shortage of trucks... the truck is now perched out along the road 35 miles from the terminal for another X number of hours waiting on the reset when the 40 year veteran driver previously would have “punched it on through”.
In the past year I have seen a resurgence of old Pete, KW and IH cab-overs sailing up and down the road again with manual controlled engines. Some of these you can tell are fresh out of the fence row but the owners are updating and restoring them to be very reliable machines again.
One old Transtar was hauling steel and as I passed him I flipped to 19 and said “Wow, buddy that sure is a nice looking old 4070!” He replied to me in a smokey old cigarette voice and I knew instantly he had been on the road for many years.
“You can shove your ELDs up your @$$!” he says.
HB you will soon have many more of these older trucks to look at up on 87. These are the guys that are still going to “make it happen” while everyone else is camped out some place along the road out of hours and the terminal down the road has 10 empty docks waiting for trucks.
Whatever.
There are deff more trucks older than 2000 out there now, but also a lot are running the glider kits with just a engine older than 2000.
As far as driving time, everyone is just using personal conveyance now to get to their next stop.
Don’t worry coaljockey, truckers might be whining like 2 year olds, but they are still managing just fine, and it is actually harder now to find false logs now with these ELDS and AOBRDS.
It’s all unfair and “whatever” until some trucker kills your family because he fell asleep at the wheel and put his truck through your family sedan.