Sagging Freight
“It was late in the day before I got out of the terminal as at least eight other drivers got their loads before me. I hooked to the sealed trailer, did my pre-trip inspection, and headed out with plans to be in Louisville the next morning. By the time I got to Hagerstown where I got off the Interstate to take US 40 west it was already long past dark.”
The daze of my youth continue…
I remember back many years ago while working for a Baltimore, Maryland based company called Keyway Transport, I picked up a load of Eaton truck rear axle assemblies at our Baltimore terminal en route to the Ford truck plant in Louisville, Kentucky. You might know Keyway today as Cowan. The company began as Cowan, changed their name to Keyway, then changed back to Cowan. You won’t see that mentioned on their website but I watched it happen. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
We had been hauling the axles inside 20' shipping containers just as they came off the ships, but it was decided that pulling our own trailers would be more cost efficient as there are fees to be paid if the shipping containers aren’t returned quickly enough. Also, as our trailers were much longer we could more easily get backhauls.
It was late in the day before I got out of the terminal as at least eight other drivers got their loads before me. I hooked to the sealed trailer, did my pre-trip inspection, and headed out with plans to be in Louisville the next morning. By the time I got to Hagerstown where I got off the Interstate to take US 40 west it was already long past dark. The load was heavy, grossing almost 80,000 lbs (The legal limit.) so the trip up Cumberland Mountain was a long slow pull. Once over the top the next hard pull would be in Kentucky.
I made my way west on US 40 then turned south on Interstate 79 after I crossed into West Virginia. In those days I 79 was one of the roughest roads in the nation with buckled concrete slabs the entire way.
As I bounced along I-79 I began to notice something very strange in my mirrors. It appeared as if my trailer was getting wider — a lot wider. I pulled over and stopped to see if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. Before my feet hit the ground I knew exactly what had happened.
As a general rule, when loading trailers you are to load no more than one thousand pounds per linear foot of trailer. As soon as I saw the middle of the trailer was sagging, thus causing the sides to flex outward, I knew what the problem was. Someone had loaded almost 44,000 lbs of axles on 20' of the trailer while locating it dead center. Instead of breaking down and spreading out the load as it came off the container they had simply put it right back on my 48' trailer just the way it had come off the 20' shipping container. My trailer was breaking in half.
As cell phones and Qualcomm were not yet widely used back then I very slowly drove about a mile on the shoulder to the next exit where I pulled into a truck stop, parked, and walked to a payphone. “Howdy,” I said when night dispatch answered the phone. “This is Billy on unit num…”
“Not you too,” the young woman on the phone cried. “How bad is it?”
“I made it to the truck stop,” I answered, “but it won’t survive going any farther.”
As it turned out the same thing had happened to several of the drivers ahead of me that night — some of them actually falling apart on the highway. I was one of the lucky ones.
I never knew exactly how the problem was solved as I was instructed to leave the trailer in the parking lot and bobtail back to Maryland where an empty trailer was waiting at the General Motors plant just off of I 81.