Overdrive Radio
547 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★ - 18 ratingsThe Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio
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Episodes
Truckers together in pursuit of victories over child abuse
January 15, 2020 21:32 - 19 minutes - 26.7 MBThe 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 Ex...
Whose 'Autonomy'? The independent owner-operator and tech skeptic featured in new film
January 07, 2020 18:02 - 31 minutes - 43.6 MBAs 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 a...
Countdown through a parking shortage, tech surge, truck boot ... 2019's Top 10 episodes
December 27, 2019 19:16 - 1 hour - 90.1 MBLet’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...
How to get more time for a malfunctioning ELD, entry level training redux, more
December 20, 2019 18:37 - 18 minutes - 25.8 MBIn 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 Hainl...
The methodical tour, by 'Choice,' from corporate America to a small flatbed fleet
December 13, 2019 19:12 - 19 minutes - 27.2 MBFredrick "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 ...
Training rule delay in the offing, operator Scott Hainline compares own '70s, 2010s training
December 06, 2019 19:45 - 27 minutes - 38.3 MBYes, 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 th...
Talent Search winner Taylor Barker's new musical bonds; Brumbach Stephens hauls one giant tree
November 28, 2019 17:05 - 36 minutes - 50.7 MBin 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...
Occupied vehicle booting: No, it does not happen to cars; More 10-4 voices
November 21, 2019 17:48 - 29 minutes - 40.1 MBAs 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...
The truck booting trap, and one small fleet owner's crusade for a solution
November 08, 2019 18:09 - 26 minutes - 36.2 MBSmall 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...
'Highways and heart attacks' to trucker Will Beeley's place in the American songbook
October 29, 2019 17:27 - 57 minutes - 78.3 MBThanks 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 yea...
No ‘crystal ball’ for FMCSA’s post-Martinez future; Jason Lee Wilson live in a cave
October 18, 2019 18:52 - 36 minutes - 50.1 MBThere'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...
VP undercover in a large carrier's training program; Voices From 10-4 D.C.
October 10, 2019 19:33 - 40 minutes - 55.4 MBPam 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 d...
California independent contractor fallout: 'Two-check' employee/contractor pay system explored
October 02, 2019 15:24 - 29 minutes - 41 MBThere'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 tes...
'Truck parking only': Working together toward a new get-in reality
September 20, 2019 19:04 - 59 minutes - 81.9 MBThe 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 par...
After the accident: First-responder superheroes, coping resources, first-person perspective
September 16, 2019 17:27 - 58 minutes - 80.1 MBOverdrive 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 o...
Engineering realities v. hyperactive marketing: The 'driverless' trucking future explored
September 06, 2019 19:04 - 39 minutes - 53.9 MBSomething 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...
Trucker Talent Search: The performances; And more on hours amid comment period
August 29, 2019 14:00 - 44 minutes - 61.4 MBIn 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 ...
Special edition: FMCSA's GATS hours of service listening session
August 28, 2019 16:43 - 1 hour - 101 MBIf 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 signifi...
18 years old and hauling in 1917; Leon Everette, Long Haul Paul from GATS
August 24, 2019 14:01 - 53 minutes - 72.8 MBWednesday 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...
Mailbag: Worm turns on regs favorability with hours proposal, readers sound off
August 16, 2019 17:53 - 18 minutes - 24.7 MBReaders 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...
What would you do for another 1-2 mpg in fuel mileage?
August 07, 2019 20:14 - 31 minutes - 42.8 MBWhat 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 a...
Longtime TA Nashville employees recount historic 2010 flood, support and recovery
July 30, 2019 19:45 - 34 minutes - 47.6 MBUp 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...
More flexible sleeper splits: It didn’t take long for this newbie team to see potential value
July 19, 2019 18:07 - 23 minutes - 31.9 MBYou’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 B...
A truckstop in the halls of Congress, and a hotshot carrier's data-use-transparency hopes
July 11, 2019 15:08 - 44 minutes - 60.9 MBDispatch 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...
40 years of trucking — and surviving — with owner-op Ingrid Brown; Plus: Talent finalists’ tunes
June 28, 2019 15:20 - 34 minutes - 62.9 MBOwner-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 Truck...
Preventing skin cancer: 'The sun will hunt you down' in the truck
June 13, 2019 19:52 - 23 minutes - 32.4 MBSo 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 thr...
'Tennessee Alabama Fireworks': The new record from Nashville-based singer-songwriter Boo Ray
May 30, 2019 20:21 - 38 minutes - 52.3 MBRide 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.
The first Penn. Make-a-Wish convoy, remembered, and: OOIDA highway-bill priorities
May 24, 2019 19:54 - 32 minutes - 44 MBIn 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 3...
Runaway on I-64 down Sandstone Mountain, and revisiting an accurate rate prediction pre-ELDs
May 13, 2019 19:59 - 34 minutes - 47.2 MBSouth 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 b...
In wake of Colo. crash, reserve judgment: Owner-op recounts '70s no-brakes run off Monteagle
May 03, 2019 18:21 - 30 minutes - 41.4 MBA 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, ...
Custom walk-in storage at the front of a dry van; bulk tank niche explored
April 26, 2019 18:53 - 27 minutes - 38.2 MBIf 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 th...
Learning from the mistakes of others with owner-op Bill Ater
April 17, 2019 20:21 - 32 minutes - 44.5 MBLearn 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 ...
Even in a roaring market, think twice before joining the stampede
April 12, 2019 19:41 - 25 minutes - 22.9 MBAn 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 ...
Lights-out at MATS, and: You're the parking expert 'where you live and where you truck to'
April 05, 2019 17:33 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBToday 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 se...
Why pick a fight with the air? And: downtime for the spot market 3 o'clock hustle
March 29, 2019 19:55 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBThis 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 Lare...
In love with trucking: Mandi Jo Pinheiro in-studio in Nashville
March 22, 2019 19:53 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBMandi 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...
90-plus-inch double-bunk sleeper in a cargo van? You bet
March 14, 2019 22:05 - 25 minutes - 23 MBIn 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-s...
1970s, 2010s trucking parallels, and: Hauling away (or into) the headaches with a cargo van
March 08, 2019 19:54 - 26 minutes - 24.2 MBIn 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...
More slow-rollin' supporting shutdown call: A talk with owner-op Brian Bucenell
March 01, 2019 18:45 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MBOwner-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 wif...
Raise scam awareness -- How to combat expensive online fakery; More from Long Haul Paul
February 21, 2019 22:10 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBAnd, 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 Ge...
A close look into the freight-demand and planning app for owner-ops with Load One
February 15, 2019 18:46 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBThere 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...
Dissecting new study on post-ELD mandate crash rates, and the blues of Watermelon Slim
February 08, 2019 18:19 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBThis 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 violatio...
Local/regional fuel hauling's winter boost: Seasonal cost tradeoffs and more with Dave Marti
February 01, 2019 19:01 - 28 minutes - 26 MBThis 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 h...
Preparing for the impossible, shutdown pessimism, and the divisions in trucking history
January 25, 2019 20:18 - 32 minutes - 29.4 MBToday'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....
The growing pains of small trucking: Midnight Xpress on blown motors, hiring mistakes and more
January 18, 2019 21:07 - 25 minutes - 23.4 MBThis edition of Overdrive Radio follows up with Andre Jackson, owner-operator with a business partner of the one-year-old Midnight Xpress small fleet, based down in Mississippi (partner in the business, owner-op Donte Ogletree, is based in Atlanta). Regular listeners will remember late last summer when Jackson was the principal guest on the podcast telling the story of his comeback from multiple heart attacks to where he is today, on his own with his authority and a small trucking company tha...
'Dynamex' ABC test 'an unfair hammer to legitimate contractors' -- view from a small fleet
January 11, 2019 19:42 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBA talk here with the owner of and a contractor to Southern California-based Angus Transportation, a now three-truck business owned and operated by Jimmy Nevarez. Leased owner-operator Darril Lightburn is in a percentage-type comensation arrangement there as an independent contractor, and Overdrive spoke with he and Nevarez both given latter’s past experience hauling rail intermodal containers in the region where they're based, attendant to a feature you’ll see in the February issue of Overdri...
2018 'coulda planned better': Counting down the top 10 Overdrive Radio podcasts of the year
December 27, 2018 21:07 - 46 minutes - 42.6 MBTake a look back on 2018 and, viewed through the lenses of time and the myriad of conversations and voices heard on the Overdrive Radio podcast, 2018 might well be dubbed the year of ticky-tack and more serious issues related to the implementation of, what else, the electronic logging device mandate. Owner-operators’ adjustments in light of that rule, which started being enforced in a significant way on April 1 of 2018, ride over almost the entirety of the top 10 most-listened to episodes her...
Weighing ECM retune options, or full-on emissions defeats, in light of enforcement risk
December 14, 2018 18:43 - 26 minutes - 24.5 MBThis edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features Overdrive Senior Editor James Jaillet, who penned the piece we suspect many of you noticed in the last couple weeks at OverdriveOnline.com, or in the December print magazine, about new enforcement heat on emissions regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to post-2006 heavy duty diesel engines. The story was spurred on by a particular case that caught everybody’s attention way back in June, when a shop in Pennsylva...
On the 'flower gravy train': Greenhouse freight, 10-4 D.C. convoy and more with Scott Hampton
December 07, 2018 19:36 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MBOwner-operator Scott Hampton pulled hoppers before transitioning to the operation he's in today, which he describes as his "flower gravy train" doing multi-drop distribution runs for shipper Dallas Johnson Greenhouse in Council Bluffs, Iowa, south to a variety of stores this time of year. When we talked for what is the latest edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast a couple weeks back, he'd hopped around the Oklahoma City area making deliveries with poinsettias in a reefer, a typical run for t...
Beware what you sign with brokers: Freight-charge offsetting of cargo claims a 'sucker's game'
December 03, 2018 19:11 - 37 minutes - 34.8 MBBeware what you sign, owner-operators, when getting set up with a broker. So notes Transportation attorney Hank Seaton, in conversation about the curious case of a Florida-based three-truck fleet who reached out about what it saw as the strange treatment of two loads her company hauled earlier this year for Bennett International Group, both as yet unpaid. Seaton describes brokers' "right to offset" clauses in contract that should be avoided -- they give the broker the right to hold payments t...