Between December 2020 and April 2021 Overdrive Radio re-aired the eight principal editions of the Over the Road podcast, produced in a partnership between Overdrive and PRX's Radiotopia podcast network and originally aired in early 2020. Here find all of Overdrive Radio's re-airs of the podcast.

The Over the Road podcast on Overdrive Radio

Count down to the new year with this playlist featuring the most-listened-to editions of the Overdrive Radio podcast, from No. 17 to No. 1, covering trucking businesses and on-highway issues, music by and for highway haulers, and so much more.

2021 in review: The top Overdrive Radio podcasts of the year

A round-up of Overdrive Radio's business-focused podcasts since 2013, including exclusive interviews, presentations and more geared to owner-operator and small fleet owner businesses among listeners.

Trucking business

Wisconsin-based owner-operator Jason Hurley, a former Schneider- leased owner-operator, made a move earlier this year to the young operation of CloudTrucks. The Texas-based company, with some operations in California, pitches to owner-operators as a "virtual carrier," operating less like a traditional asset-based carrier and more like a support company, basically. Cloud puts emphasis on its technology and systems in place to support otherwise independent businesses.

Yet they're no broker or dispatch service -- it's CloudTrucks’ motor carrier authority under which an owner leased there runs.

And though its model generally is tech-assisted self-dispatch for how owner-operators run there, it does field a functional support staff on the back end to smooth out the rough edges of any carrier-broker transaction. The brokered freight market comprises the large majority of its freight universe. Since founding within the last years, they’ve grown quickly. They were up to more than 70 owner-ops leased as of the company’s most-recent MCS-150 federal update earlier this year.  

Hurley was attracted initially for a percentage contract for compensation much lower than is traditional for asset-based companies taking care of leased owners' liability insurance. CloudTrucks allots 5 points of its 15%-per-load fee to the owner-operator's liability insurance, Hurley said, leaving a 10 percent fee otherwise for access to the company's freight platform and support networks. What he's found so far there? Find out in this podcast. 

Read about CloudTrucks' "Road to Independence" partnership with third-party leasing companies to offer a path to truck ownership for company drivers through fair lease-purchase programs: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15065768/alabama-truckers-fight-truckonly-toll-proposal-in-mobile

More from Overdrive Radio: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

Real success leased to a 'virtual' carrier: Owner-operator Jason Hurley and CloudTrucks

The context for the conversation you'll hear in today's 60th-anniversary special edition of Overdrive Radio, conducted at the Great American Trucking Show in 2019, was twofold, centered around both driver training and history. 

Over the course of the 20th century, as you'll hear, the licensing required for a driver to operate interstate tightened. In the early days of motorized transport, an 18-year-old had no problem being licensed for interstate operation of what passed for the big trucks of the day. 

They weren't, of course, very big at all by today's standards. The picture here is one of of Walter Thompson of Shelburn, Indiana, grandfather of Jay Thompson, now an independent consultant to various trucking and natural gas interests through his Transportation Business Associates company.

As I wrote at the time of this conversation's original airing two years ago, Thompson’s been quite a resource for me when it comes to owner-operator and trucking history in general. He grew up in rural Indiana and starting his working career driving big trucks, a route taken by the generations of men in his family as well, all the way back to his grandfather.

Walter Thompson had a chauffer’s license enabling him to move freight as early as age 18, in 1917. And given debate continues around training and potentially opening up interstate operations, perhaps in a limited fashion, to some drivers younger than 21, Thompson's thoughts do more than just gives us a window on trucking's history through the lens of one family's experience.

We were also talking at the time about the potential potential for a pilot program for under-21 CDL drivers, then under intense debate, as we sat down to ferret out a little bit of the history there.

As Thompson says, history often repeats itself in various ways … 

Find more installments in Overdrive's 60th-anniversary series of lookbacks on history via http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history

What came before the CDL? 18 years old and hauling interstate in 1917

The thumbnail image with today's podcast was the product of the 2019 groundswell of grassroots advocacy that rose leading into the ultimate passage of the AB 5 law in California, which codified a controversial court decision that applied the ABC contractor test in the state. That test, to say the least, is problematic for owner-operator lease arrangements with motor carriers as they've traditionally been drawn up -- and federally recognized now for decades in the Truth in Leasing regulations. 

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, we’re going to drop into the annual Symposium event hosted by Overdrive sister fleet publication CCJ. This past Wednesday in Birmingham, Alabama, at the event, CTA CEO Shawn Yadon described what he saw with his own eyes on the ground in 2019 as that groundswell of advocacy rose. The result of that advocacy – a myriad of carveouts in the law by the legislature aimed at a laundry list of professions, but not for trucking, not for owner-operators.

That set up the Supreme Court case Yadon and CTA filed Monday, and here we get more on potential outcomes from both Yadon and transportation attorney Greg Feary of the Scopelitis, Garvin, Light, Hanson & Feary law firm. Both men had much more to say about the history of how we got to this point, with owner-operators and their contracting motor carriers still playing the high-stakes waiting game on the outcome. 

Read more about the session in this report from the scene Wednesday: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15113768/the-california-conundrum-independent-contractor-state-of-play

And more about the 2019 advocacy efforts here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14897067/rumblings-of-protest-out-west-in-wake-of-california-contractor-law

Owner-ops' big role out West as AB 5 wound toward this week's Supreme Court filing

In this edition of Overdrive Radio, hear the musical entries of, and interviews with, the three songwriters who are finalists in this year’s Overdrive Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search. It's something of a preview of the big finale, set for September 16, at 5 p.m. Eastern time, and streaming from OverdriveOnline.com. 

Find out just how to tune in live that date and sign up for email reminders just before the broadcast via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/15066153/trucker-talent-search-final-competition-set-for-september-16

In the podcast, we'll hear from trucker Mike Sheffield of Kentucky coal country, from Michigan-based Grassmid driver Rich Scripps, and Dayton, Ohio-based Guy Archer. All are featured in conversation, too, with the great Eric Harley, host of Red Eye Radio, Overdrive's partners in the program, now in its 8th year.

This year's event's proved to be a special one, no doubt, with these excellent songwriters with incredibly diverse styles.

Read more about Guy Archer via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/15065701/trucker-talent-search-finalist-covers-chesneys-anything-but-mine

Mike Sheffield: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/15065572/mike-sheffield-performs-original-song-hammer-down-again

Rich Scripps: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/15065636/trucker-talent-search-competitor-covers-hawaiian-christmas-song

Trucker Talent Search preview: Sheffield, Scripps, Archer square off September 16

Helping carriers dealing with the 'fun' that can come with safety and compliance during federal or state audits is at least a good part of the life of Fleet Safety Services consultant Jeff Davis, the principal voice in this edition of Overdrive Radio. After starting in trucking as a driver, Davis eventually made a career helping mostly small motor carriers through those compliance reviews. 

At the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies this past week in Nashville, Davis offered information into new audit activity related to the relatively new drug and alcohol testing results Clearinghouse maintained by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration -- and common slip-ups carriers are making with required pre-employment and other checks there. 
Too many, he said, are getting dinged by auditors for violations that are ultimately easily prevented, as he tells it. There’s a lot happening in terms of the Clearinghouse, too, that Davis rounds up in what follows here, certainly germane to those of you in the audience who employ or lease with one or more drivers or owner-operators. 

Also in the podcast: We'll dive into the Small Fleet Champ awards presentation Thursday night to the record-setting group of NASTC attendees at its annual conference – according to President David Owen, attendance at the event nearly doubled prior years’ registrations, truly something to behold. 

Congrats again to finalists Hallahan Transport and Professional Transportation Services Inc. – and the ultimate Small Fleet Champ in Silver Creek Transportation. This isn't the last we'll hear from owners Rob Hallahan, Nick Hewitt and Jason Cowan, be assured. 

Read more about each of the finalist fleets:
Hallahan -- https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280238/hallahan-transport-thriving-on-lessons-learned-from-the-past
PTSI: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280537/trucking-legacy-of-nick-hewitt-and-platform-hauler-ptsi
Silver Creek Transportation: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15115043/diversification-silver-creek-transportations-growth-secret

'Fun' with safety/compliance: Low-hanging fruit to avoid drug/alcohol Clearinghouse violations

Track back through last week’s big trucking-issues hearing convened in Senate Commerce's Subcommittee on Transportation, Freight, Pipelines and Safety to work through some of the pressing issues ahead of the next highway bill, due in 2026.

Featured trucking witnesses before the subcommittee and their full written testimonies: 
**Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/9B1EF7F2-DB30-4A08-9844-DC9F237282D5 
**American Trucking Associations leader Chris Spear: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/FA35E84B-5DB2-4784-AD1F-0F0BD0065EC8
**Teamsters Union president Sean O'Brien: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/1B7508C5-A25B-4ACF-94BD-EBC2F83711FA

In the podcast, featuring audio from the hearing, witnesses debate driverless or otherwise automated truck development and regulation, likewise automation's role in safety, which regular Overdrive readers may have caught also in the initial report from the hearing last week: https://overdriveonline.com/15751214 

You’ll hear about the huge rise in cargo theft the subcommittee also addressed in a hearing early in the year, aided and abetted by identity theft and double brokering and other forms of fraud in freight markets increasingly plied by organized rings. You’ll hear about other techs like automatic emergency braking, some mention of flexibiltiies in the hours of service, about ELDs, unauthorized immigration and credentials fraud with practices like CDLs illegally procured for cash. 

What you won’t hear is any mention of the term "non-domiciled CDL," though in response to a question from Senator Bernie Moreno (Republican of Ohio), Teamsters President O'Brien referenced carriers recruiting drivers for temporary work in the U.S. from overseas. The non-domiciled CDL is a credential that U.S. states can issue to such drivers, who don’t have permanent immigration status in the U.S. but rather hold temporary work authorization. Some states don’t issue these CDLs, and many others haven’t been issuing non-domciled CDLs this way for very long, but the practice has certainly taken off over the last several years. Overdrive's own Alex Lockie's last-week-released research showed recent-years growth in states all around the nation with a 50-state accounting -- download the 20-page report via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917

There’s a whole lot more than just CDL issuance issues to chew on when it comes the next highway bill, of course. In this week's podcast, we let the tape roll on the hearing. Catch your elected representatives and the associations that represent trucking business owners and operators in action, interrogating a wide array of trucking and broader transportation issues.

OOIDA, ATA, Teamsters scrum in Senate hearing: CDL fraud, training, driverless trucks, more

This week's edition of Overdrive Radio takes a deeper dive into Overdrive's relatively new Load Profit Analyzer tool: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer

Go there and pull up the analyzer to follow along with this detailed walk-through with owner-operator business coach and longtime Overdrive contributor Gary Buchs. As regular readers will likely recall from when it was introduced late in 2024, the Analyzer was in part inspired by Buchs’ own efforts at individual load profit analysis, tracing back to his decades as owner-operator himself. (Gary retired from the road in 2019, yet continues private efforts as a mentor/business coach to other owner-operators.)  

I brought Gary on to talk us through a few divergent load examples in hopes that more owner-operators in the audience might benefit from what is in essence a fairly simple calculator, but might also be a powerful personal accountability tool for business performance long-term. 

So, with this episode, get to a spot where you can pull out the mobile device or laptop and go to https://OverdriveOnline.com/load-analyzer 

We'll run through the three cost-input fields you see there, namely: 
**Fixed cost per day under load
**Salary per day under load
and **Variable cost per mile

Then analyze results for three different loads all originating in Dallas with offers at wildly different rates: $2.30, $3, and a whopping $10/mile on a short haul. When it comes to profits, though, results from the analyzer might be surprising if you closely take into consideration the impacts of time spent on each load. Set up with all those different cost metrics, considering your contribution to your home budget's needs in the salary on the expense side of the equation, fundamentally the analyzer is set up to help you do that with a close eye on business profits. 

There are always dozens of variables at play in load selection and post-delivery analysis, but engaging with your own numbers with the tool we hope helps yield better profit results over time, as Gary likes to say, as you "touch those numbers" routinely. Give it a whirl with today's podcast. 

More from Gary on the topic of negotiations in this past Overdrive Radio edition: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15736582

Three loads -- $2.30, $3, $10/mile: Which haul would you choose? Profit analysis might surprise you

This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast, another entry in our 2025 Trucker of the Year competition: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year 

You may have seen Matt Cole’s feature a couple weeks back now about longtime independent Ron Kelsey, who’s achieved something of an "owner-operator holy grail," as it were, trucking for decades now in a 1981 Peterbilt 359 and hauling direct freight for customers that date back three decades for the owner: https://overdriveonline.com/15751895 

Kelsey’s recent-history experience, too, stands as testament to the bedrock value of direct-freight relationships when the proverbial you-know-what hits the fan. With a "freight recession" ballyhooed by prognosticators time and again over the last three years, and spot rates down over the same period, Matt Cole asked Kelsey how he’d fared through tough times of these recent years.

"I really don't notice a change," Kelsey said, on the ground with his two principal customers. "I'm not No. 1 anymore" among independents hauling for them, given as he's progressed in his career he's not quite as consistently over-the-road as he was in past years. Yet general freight slowdowns he hasn't noticed. "I work when I want to work," and the loads are plentiful, always something availble, loading pipe outbound from the Phoenix and most often steel on the return. Invoiced, customers pay within days, too. 

"I'm very fortunate," he added, but there's more to his business prowess than just following the tides of fate, as you'll hear in the podcast. He’s well set-up to weather anything that comes, ultimately, and has come a long way himself from the young man who would end up inking a deal for his 1981 Pete after two-stepping with the owner way back in 1984. He’s hauled with it ever since, getting his authority 10 years later and building what the Kelsey's Trucking business remains to this day. 

Hear his story in his words in today's episode, starting like many an owner-operator in a straight truck in vocational operations before a trial by fire over the road in the late 1970s. 

Nominate your own or another deserving owner-operator business for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

Freight recession? Trucker of the Month Ron Kelsey just hasn't seen it with two direct customers

This week on the podcast we’re diving into the trends uncovered in the July report authored by our own Alex Lockie documenting the rise of the so-called “non-domiciled CDL” in recent years in the U.S. It’s a kind of license that many states can and do issue to those in the States from other countries and with temporary work authorization. If you haven’t downloaded our report for yourself as of yet, it’s available via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917

Lockie painstakingly gathered non-domiciled CDL issuance data from most states in the nation, and put it all in a single, 20-plus-page report that's available now, even as federal officials work to begin and complete their own review of such CDL-issue practices. 

Context for it? As of but a year ago, very few around trucking had even heard the "non-domiciled CDL" term. 

That includes Raman Dhillon, head of the North American Punjabi Trucking Association, who tells his story in part in this episode. "I learned in the last seven, eight months or so" that such a license existed, he said. At once, as our own Alex Lockie reported in conversation with Dhillon in June, he could see the influx of people into trucking throughout the pandemic period, and continued issues on the CDL training front with fly-by-night schools rushing people into work behind the wheel: https://overdriveonline.com/15748790 

The latter -- the inadequate CDL training issue -- is something he had personal experience with in years past, making it among principal issues for which he continues to advocates a fix. 

Personally, he’s heartened to see the recent federal attention to CDL issuance practices broadly speaking, and non-domiciled CDL issuance in particular. "It's not only a trucking issue," as Dhillon has it. "It's a national security issue. A person crosses the border. Within a couple of months they get their work permit, and within the next month they get their [commercial] license." More time, more training, more vetting, he said, is certainly in order for all kinds of reasons. 

In the podcast, Dhillon walks back through his own experience immigrating to the U.S. in the early-1990s after his father drove truck in Indian military as he was growing up, through to establishing the Primelink Express trucking company with family and other close trucking associates, then the NAPTA association, in 2018, in the wake of advocacy ahead of the ELD mandate.

NAPTA isn't just for Punjabi-Americans, though, as you'll hear. It's set up for any trucking company owner or operator with discount buying groups for fuel, tires, and other parts, likewise back-office support services and more. 

Dive into the story today with both Raman Dhillon and Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie, who chronicles just how he came to author the 20-page report documenting non-domiciled CDL issuance in most states around the nation. If you haven’t read the report yet, go give it a whirl: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917 

As Alex Lockie puts it in the podcast, "i look at it as just kind of a factual framework," he said. "We have maps in the report. ... We have a detailed write-up of every single state and what they told me. Look at your state.  See where your state is on this."

You might just be surprised by what you find. 

Rise of the 'non-domiciled CDL' for non-citizen truck drivers: Safety, rates, security

This week's Overdrive Radio podcast is a re-air for owner-operators and other truckers on the occasion of the 2025 Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Brake Safety Week inspection blitz. Get over to OverdriveOnline.com for an updated list of our Top 10 toughest states for brakes violations, to get a bit of a clue into where you might expect inspectors’ scrutiny of braking systems to be most intense this coming week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail/article/15753592/10-toughest-states-for-truck-brake-inspections-as-blitz-arrives

Brake Safety Week runs August 24-31, and along with reporting around brake-system inspections there for this episode we revisit a talk with Fleet Safety Services’ Jeff Davis delivered at the 2023 annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies. Davis offered time-honored ways fleets and owner-operators can avoid the inspection to start with. Even in an inspection-blitz week like this one, fundamentals still apply. And keeping on top of maintenance -- particularly with regard to lights -- is a big part of it, but there’s more to it than that. So we’ll just let the tape roll on the past episode this week. Keep in mind it was released ahead of the Spring 2024 Roadcheck event, initially. There are plenty references to that now-bygone inspection blitz event throughout, but nonetheless plenty to chew on from Davis. 

More brakes-related resources at OverdriveOnline.com/15753592

Even during blitz week, fundamentals count: How to avoid inspection without dodging scales

With this edition of the podcast, just two days out from Christmas, we’re starting a run back through a little high-quality road listening with Overdrive's podcast coproduction with PRX’s Radiotopia network. The Over the Road podcast ran originally between February and June 2020, and the principal eight-episode series was hosted by our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. Therein, we hoped to give mainstream, general-public listeners an intimate portrait of the wide array of voices and issues emanating out of and hotly debated within the owner-operator community, also with clear portraits of the men and women doing the work of trucking. 

And while Over the Road was broadcast for a general listening audience, we did the best we could to accommodate the perspectives and needs of those who, like you, are on the inside of trucking. What emerged was an uncommon sort of end result -– less an explainer of trucking to the outsider than an exploration of the present through stories of the past, in a lot of different ways. Mistakes made, redeemed, careers launched and ruined and relaunched, and so much more. Herein, find a replay of Episode 1 from the 2019 Mid-America Trucking Show, when so many were hopeful for hours of service change (which has since occurred) and the stainless was polished, the camaraderie had. Think of it as a trip down memory lane, to a time when four people could talk for hours within the stagnant air of a tractor’s cab in lieu of a recording studio, without much worry of just who was infecting who, and with just what. We hope you enjoy. 

Also in the podcast: A taste of an interview I did with owner-operator Germann Soeth out of Frederick, Maryland, with mostly dump work and principally in a 1998 Kenworth W900 that was featured in past at OverdriveOnline.com When we caught back up with owner-operator Soeth in October, though, he was showing a 1976 vintage Kenworth cabover. He was, interestingly enough, getting ready to put it into service hauling loads after a long retirement, given a significant breakdown with his 1990s conventional. Find out how he took the rig from scrap yard to working order over the course of a few years here. 

Find more podcasts in Radiotopia's podcast network, including "Over the Road," via http://radiotopia.fm

See Germann Soeth's 1998 Kenworth W900B conventional via https://www.overdriveonline.com/the-trucking-history-of-independent-germann-soeth-and-his-long-running-1998-kenworth-w900b/

Subscribe to Overdrive's daily newsletter for trucking news, views and analysis geared toward current and prospective owner-operators: OverdriveOnline.com/newsletter-signup

Back to the 'Biggest Tailgate in Trucking' -- and Germann Soeth's 1976 KW K100

A note for Overdrive Radio subscribers using some podcasting apps: We’ve got a new, redesigned website coming at http://OverdriveOnline.com – if you regularly listen via a podcasting app other than those offered by Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or Apple or Google podcasts, we’re transitioning to a different principle RSS feed for Overdrive Radio. If you need to in your app, you can update the settings with this feed URL and be certain to get all of the episodes going forward: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:63998864/sounds.rss

In today's edition, we’re taking a run back through another episode of the Over the Road podcast series -- hopefully engrossing listening to take you through a long run and perhaps a little diversion from the political rancor of our chaotic time. This is episode 2 in the OTR series -- originally titled “Why We Drive.” Regular readers will know we produced Over the Road in collaboration with PRX’s Radiotopia podcast network, and it was hosted by our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. In the episode, Marhoefer and producer Lacy Roberts spent time with two operators in Grand Island, Neb., owner-operator Jared Sidlo as well as Kenyette Godhigh-Bell, based out of Florida. In April 2019 when the interview was conducted, Godhigh-Bell was right at one year in trucking, pulling a reefer as a company driver with Grand Island Express. The visit with her featured in the podcast also included some time in an owner-operator training course of sorts at Grand Island headquarters -- no matter of chance, as it were.

Less than two years since we talked with her on the anniversary of maiden voyage with Grand Island Express, she's now out trucking with her own authority in a 2017 Freightliner Cascadia near identical to the company truck Marhoefer describes in the episode, minus as yet the "Lady K" insignia on the door. She’s power only at the moment with her authority active for just a couple of months – part of the wave of new authorities since mid-summer host Todd Dills wrote about in this story a month or so ago: https://www.overdriveonline.com/volatile-year-growing-pains-in-app-freight-pricing-value-of-negotiation/

As you listen to this OTR episode, keep Godhigh-Bell’s present in mind as she speaks from the past –- wonderful, simply put, isn't it, to see a plan come to fruition. 

Find the Radiotopia podcast network via http://Radiotopia.fm

Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: http://overdriveonline.com/newsletter-signup

Trucking with authority and other reasons 'Why we drive' -- OTR rewind No. 2

For today’s episode of the Overdrive Radio podcast, brace for a long run through the history of trucking with former household-goods-hauling owner-operator Finn Murphy, also a well-versed student of that history. Murphy is interviewed and much of the story is narrated by Overdrive contributing writer and reefer hauler "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer. This brief history of trucking in America tracks the rise of the business from the 1920s up through today -– and the owner-operator's central role in it all. It was originally part of the Over the Road podcast series, Overdrive's 2020 coproduction with PRX's Radiotopia

We’ll hear form a past wildcatter about, among other thing, the Allis Chalmers "Purple People Eater" engine in one of his trucks; from Murphy about his post-deregulation career, made possible in part by the 1980 Motor Carrier Act’s removal of barriers to entry that kept many new ventures out of non-agricultural freight markets; and about the rise of the Teamsters in regulated markets from the 1930s on.

If you missed the original airing -- it'd be unsurprising, as it aired originally smack dab in the center of the initial surge of COVID-19 cases late last March that kept the entire nation on edge -- you're in for a treat. 

Also in the podcast, another special piece of history in Ohio-based Fred Bowerman's preservation of this 1978 Peterbilt 352, pictured during "That's a Big 10-4 on D.C." on the National Mall this past year, an event Bowerman's helped to organize three years running.

Find a distillation of owner-operator via this link to Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills' "Breaking Free" history, written attendant to Overdrive's 2011 50th anniversary: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/14876086/breaking-free-owner-operator-history-upon-overdrives-50th-anniversary

A special series highlighting elements of Overdrive's and trucking's history attendant to our ongoing 60th-anniversay year is available via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4406897

Hear more from the Over the Road podcast editions: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4405867

Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: http://overdriveonline.com

The OTR 'Brief history of trucking in America' -- and this preserved 1978 Pete 352

In this edition of Overdrive Radio, take a tour down I-75 in Kentucky in search of an answer to the age-old question: Who has the best nanner pudding among the truck stops along that route, and which one of them was the first to advertise it on the CB?

This week, we run back through some trucking micro-history with our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer via another edition in the Over the Road podcast series, originally produced by PRX’s Radiotopia in collaboration with us here at Overdrive. It’s a veritable caper of a episode, so hang on tight.

Also in the podcast: A fairly moderate amount of snow in and around Evanston, Wyoming, this season has put a bit of a damper on business for the Dustbusters provider of road de-icers and stabilizers for dusty gravel roads. It hasn't, however, stopped work in the shop on a beauty of a daycab 1980 Kenworth W900A owner-operator Martin Herman has put in with this crew -- Dustbusters owner Craig Prete, shop foreman Cole Potter, mechanic Kipp Knight and Austin Oliver. Regular readers may well recall Herman’s own 1970 model W900A from our detail of it back last summer: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/14898050/ownerop-talks-roadside-inspections-and-rig-restoration 

In the podcast, Herman details a good bit of the work put into Prete's 1980 after it had been more or less idle for many years. The daycab features a rolloff body Dustbusters will most likely use simply as a flatbed for hauling bagged product. (The tow companies in the area are keeping an eye out for stiff competition, nonetheless, Herman joked.) 

Near the end of this week's episode, too, a brand-new song from Marhoefer, in part inspired by the stories told here, in what was originally Over the Road episode 4, airing early last year. You can here the song in full via the following link, and keep tuned for more releases from Marhoefer from this session with cellist Michael Ronstadt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQuVqTy_4jU

Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: overdriveonline.com

The best nanner pudding on I-75 -- and the custom restoration of this 1980 Kenworth W900A

In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, another in the run through our eight-episode Over the Road podcast series, coproduced for 2020 with PRX's Radiotopia podcast network. "Back home" featured our own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer, host of the show, and Over the Road contributing producer Lacy Roberts on a haul back through Lacy’s childhood as a daughter of a trucking family growing up in Montana. The tale, among the most-listened-to within the trucking community (the podcast was broadcast out to a general listening audience as well), offered a moving portrait of the sacrifices over-the-road drivers make balancing work and family life -- and the sacrifices, too, those back home endure.

Before we get there, though, Captain Jon Olsen of the Minnesota State Patrol offers some food for thought on the COVID-19 emergency declaration's exemption to the hours of service, still in place at least through the end of the month. He and colleagues note there seems to be a disconnect between those along the food supply chain as to just what loads qualify as "emergency restocking" and what loads don't. Also: dogs aren’t livestock, maybe. That should make sense momentarily.

Read more about claiming the emergency exemption via this link to early coverage of it: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14897583/emergency-hos-exemption-guidance-for-owner-operators

Hear more from the Radiotopia podcast network, including Over the Road, via http://radiotopia.fm

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COVID hours exemption not valid 'just because you're hauling food'; OTR's 'Back home'

The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio