Heavy Haul Elegance!
#3 June 2025
Dear Friends and Fellow WildCats.
This story, we’re now a few years into this Mid Eastern business. A lot of information is beginning to be revealed. This title, Heavy Hall. Doesn’t that give you an instant mental picture of some enormous, big truck with lots of axles with tremendous haul weight limits. These are usually traveling with escorts, big honking construction equipment or fixtures of sort, right? Sorry to report, wrong mental picture.
For me, there’s this one guy that still comes to mind from some of these earlier days. He’s no longer in the trade so I think I will just use his real initials. We still correspond from time to time; he’s one of the Mid Eastern lifetime story stickers. He was sort of a part of this select group, yet he mostly kept to himself. Takes away from the group concept, yet there was a group of these folks. A low-profile kind of dude. I say a low pro fellow yet in an oddly different way he stood out. Maybe that was just to me. This young man (I was even younger) had a mission to accomplish and a set way to do so and was also always a class act sort of guy. When he stepped out of the truck, he looked a certain level of “profession”, and he spoke that way and just all around carried himself that way. Stay with me, I’m leading into this story subject title. Just FYI, this story is also a true reflection. DRP was the first guy to confide in me about these Sunday runners from the far north or the far south. He helped me understand these trucking patterns of travel. It just depended on what side of the cycle you were on. Don’t forget the title of the Series.
DRP’s trucks, as my memory goes, were Peterbilt’s, they were glistening black, they had long hoods and a long distance from the front wheels to the back, and they always pulled nice shiny trailers. They were super “clean” yet not too flashed up. His rigs were always kept clean and every one of these combos he owned over the years just spoke the word, Elegant. This went on for quite some time and he cycled through a few of these machines. I came to learn about that too. More in a minute.
There have come to be good reasons for all of this, it’s on the heavy side of things. The trucks were heavy, well some of these trucks had double frames and some of the trailers too. For this line of mission work the empty weight became mostly irrelevant. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, these trailers also had motors hanging on the front. (refrigeration for those reading that maybe don’t know this part, don’t think it, it’s possible!) It took awhile for me to get it all wrangled out. How could it be? I had already witnessed a multitude of trailers stacked front to back. Dry goods, corn, tomatoes, various mixed produce, and a whole mix of other stuff.
Let me ask you something. Have you ever picked up a box of frozen fish or any seafood for that matter? OK, have you ever picked up a box of lead fishing weights. That’s why it’s called weights. This is also why the equipment cycled. Breaking down or breaking in half was not an option on the mission, at least if being successful was in any part of the mission. I sort of hate spilling beans after all these years, but this is a long-gone era. Start in Boston or Miami, they would start loading the (fresh / freshly frozen seafood) in the trailer on Friday afternoon and by Saturday midday there’d be two loads (two $$ pays) in the wagon, and most of the weigh station scales were closed on weekends. Let em roll! :) The dodgeball trips north or south would begin. By the time most got to Manning (mid-point / Mid Eastern) they had unloaded about half of the second load off the trailer. Maybe we will talk about LTL drops another time. With one and a half loads still in the trailer at 100k or so rain or shine those beauties would creak as they eased in and out of the wash bay door, keeping those rigs maintained, clean, leak and stain free. There truly was a lot of safety in mind with this crew of operators. To be broken down and caught out of sequence was not a good option. I have by far run over the optimum word count for most of us readers, so I’ll close.
Heavy Haul Trucking. It’s not always huge pieces of equipment or big fixtures of the industrial revolution on the back of a rig with 15 axles. Sometimes it is one of the WildCats Truckers of pure Elegance, a neatly dressed gentleman wearing nice shoes. Pure Class! These were some fun times. RIP “Elegant Heavy Haul Rigs” Dig on my friend DRP! Cheers! AND Peace!