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March 2016, where are you going ??

fastman_1

fastman_1

Veteran Expediter
Owner/Operator
OntarioVanMan said:
like putting the thumb on the scale.....they feed the cows this corn mixture about a month before the auction....causes them to hold water and bloat..More $$$$$$..LOL.....
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Yea one of my friends is a bull hauler, they feed them more in transit to get that extra pound out of them
 
Leonard2015

Leonard2015

Rookie Expediter
Driver
Any of you class c drivers. Do you have a hazmat endorsement? If so does it get you more loads?
Thanks
 
Turtle

Turtle

Administrator
Staff member
Retired Expediter
Leonard2015 said:
Any of you class c drivers. Do you have a hazmat endorsement? If so does it get you more loads?
Thanks
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Leonard2015
Yes, but in my experience it doesn't get you enough of them to justify the hassle and expense of the fingerprinting and background check, and the ongoing and repeated training and recertification that goes with it.

It may depend in the carrier you are with. In the days of yore when I was with Co-Way NOW, I ran enough placarded HAZMAT that I was pretty much logging all the time. When you run a placarded load you have to log your hours, and the logbook needs to show the previous 7 days to ensure you haven't run out of hours. That means when you run a placarded load, even after delivery you need to keep logging for another 7 days in case you get another placarded load within that time frame. That happened often at Con-Way NOW. Sometimes months would go by without me running a HAZMAT load, but then there's be a 4 month stretch where I was running one or more per week.

Panther was another story. Despite requiring van drivers to have a CDL of some kind, which usually meant a Class C with a HZAMAT endorsement (though A, B or a C with a Passenger endorsement was fine), they would not put placardable HAZMAT on a van. The main reason is that cargo van drivers don't know how to log, so to ask a van driver to log a load once in a blue moon was just asking for a DOT cmackdown for logbook violations, and the carrier gets enough of those with big trucks as it is. However, there are plenty of hazardous materials load which do not require placarding (like a 5-gallon bucket of paint, or a pallet containing 4 car batteries), but Panther would not put that on a van unless the driver had a HAZMAT endorsement, despite the fact that you don't need a CDL or an endorsement to haul hazardous materials which do not require placards. So at Panther, the HAZMAT endorsement won't get you any additional loads that require placards, but it will get you a LOT of loads like a pallet of hair spray, a drum of paint, a load of copper sulfate, that they would otherwise not load onto a van where the driver doesn't have the endorsement.

In the last 5 years at Load One I have hauled exactly three loads which required placards. I have hauled perhaps a dozen loads where the phone call I got was, "You can haul HAZMAT, right?" and I'd answer in the affirmative, and then I'd get to the shipper and find out the load doesn't even require placarding and thus didn't require the endorsement. rendering the question itself pointless. So I think most if not all of those particular loads I got out of sheer caution of ignorance on the part of dispatch. In that respect, yes, the endorsement got me some extra loads.

All things being equal, it is better to have the endorsement than not have it. One, because it will get you a few loads you likely wouldn't get otherwise, and two, the knowledge gained by going through the training and test materials is invaluable. It not only makes you more aware and knowledgeable of the placarded truck next to you on the roadway, but it lets you know very doubt as to whether you can haul the freight a shipper is trying to put on your van.

Having said all that, last fall when it came time to renew my CDL and the endorsement, I surrendered my CDL in favor of a regular operator's drivers license because, at Load One anyway, it just didn't get me enough loads to warrant the hassle and expense of renewing it. :)
 
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