Truck life in the slow lane

Well what a day today was. First my next load to Sacramento was taken away and they gave me one to pick up at 6 pm going to Kansas city.

My eldest son also drives a cross country truck for another company. So he happen to be passing Thu Denver and we met up for lunch sense my load didn't pick up till later, that was the nice part of the day.

After lunch I headed over to Fort Morgan CO to get my load. it only took them an hour to load. (that is kinda fast for the truck world) As soon as i was loaded they sent me a swap ( a swap is when you swap your loaded trailer with another truck, and they are normally done to help someone get home or to make the load get to its destination on time.). well the swap was only 10 miles down the road.

I scaled my load at the place I loaded at and all the axle weights came out good. you can get a very costly ticket for being over weight on 1 axle or for the combination of all 5 witch is called gross weight, also in some states they only let you have the rear wheels of your trailer a certain distance from the king pin (king pin is what connects the trailer to the tractor) I.E. California only allows 40 feet from king pin to center of rear axle. It can be difficult with 44,000 pound loads to achieve a good weight on all axles and roll into California.

When I got to the swap and met up with the other driver it turned out he had my Sacramento load I had the day before. When we swapped the paperwork on our load we also swapped scale tickets. Because we have the same type trucks we could tell what we were going to weigh. His scale ticket stated that the rear axel on his truck weighed 35,100 pounds, your only allowed 34,000 on the rear set and the driver set of axles and 12,00 on the steer. I asked him if he adjusted the rear axle after he weighed the load and he said he slid them back 2 holes to the California limit.

This is not good every hole you side the rear axle's back only moves about 230 to 250 pounds depending on how the cargo is set inside the trailer.

After we swapped trailers I went to the nearest scale to reweigh and see it what he did helped any. it didn't the rear still weighed 35,100 pounds so I had to let night dispatch know. They told me i had 2 choices. 1st take the load back to Golden Co where it came from and have the cargo reworked or, 2ND make the other driver come back and take the load himself. I opted to take it back and have it reworked myself because the other driver was headed home.

On my way back to Golden i was stopped at a state scale house, not a good thing. The weight on my rear axle on their scale read 35,160 pounds. they made me park and bring in all my paperwork (a ton of paperwork with trucks). when i got in the office the officer asked me for my registration, i handed it over. I then noticed i forgot the most important paperwork, my licence and medical card in the truck. I asked if i could go get it and the officer said I wouldn't need it. Strange if I was getting a Ticket I would think he would need it. After standing there for 10 minuets while he typed away on his computer he said i could go. Stunned I left as fast as I could without running.

My lucky day!

When i got to Golden I presented my problem and they told me to drop the trailer in the lot and call back for it tomorrow. I asked what would take so long to rework the load and they said it came from the factory over loaded and had to go back there, not the warehouse. Great a ton of waisted time because the other driver never bothered to make it right.

So I headed to the local truck stop and hit the showers. Maybe I'll get to pick it up tomorrow and run with it to CA.

Some days are just a pain.