I was looking for him in the wrong place when I walked into the truck lot this morning at the Lebanon, Tenn., Pilot stop on exit 283 on I-40. Turns out, as you can see below, Christenson Transportation leased dry van hauler Clifford Petersen was parked in the car lot, bobtail, given he’d dropped his trailer at Christenson’s local terminal and, as he put it, of course didn’t want to take up a spot from a combo unit in the main lot when he arrived the night prior for his break.
We had coffee and talked over Petersen’s recent-years history in trucking, including his current TRAC lease entered into with Christenson with a four-year term and ending balloon of $30,000 or so for the Paccar-engine-powered 2018 KW T680 he’s in. With 30,000 lbs. in a dry box recently he hit an impressive 10-plus in the mpg department, which combined with plenty miles under his miles-pay contract with the carrier has him happy with income about a year in, despite some bad-luck hiccups he talked about in our conversation, which you can hear in this the latest edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast:
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Apologies for getting a bit off the late-in-the-week schedule for the weekly podcast — last week, regular readers may have noticed, was my annual R&R with the family (hats off to highway haulers we followed back and forth through middle Tennessee, into Kentucky and Illinois and the St. Louis area in Missouri).
Back at it, and glad to be so, this week.
Overdrive Extra blog contributors Petersen, Paul Marhoefer and Editorial Director Max Heine well-minded the blogroll store, so to speak, here in my absence. Here’s hoping you caught their stuff in the last week, and ongoing.
