After delivering to Madison, WI in early morning (yesterday), my load assignment was again changed.
The trailer in Green Bay, WI hadn't gotten loaded the night before so that shipment was cancelled. So, I now was headed to Kohler, WI for a shipment to a rail yard in Chicago. This would be my first time taking a "rail" trailer to a rail yard. So, mid-morning I grabbed an empty rail trailer and headed toward Kohler.
Dispatch told me that although wasn't scheduled to be picked up until 4:00 PM, I could pick it up anytime since it was "in the computer system." Right. Guess who waited until 4:00 PM to pick the trailer up in Kohler, WI?
It rained the whole way to Chicago. I hit rush hour in Milwaukee, WI as well as Chicago, IL. Traffic was still bad at 8:30 PM in Chicago!
The rail yard was an interesting experience. To get into the yard, I entered into a "hole-in-the-wall" sort of entrance between two viaducts (if you weren't looking closely, you would have missed the entrance!) Since I hadn't been there before, I had to check in to get some sort of ID number for the present and all future visits to the yard. Then I dropped the trailer. However, I had no clue how to exit the yard. So I went back into the office area, smiled, and in a loud voice asked a bunch of truckers how to get out of the yard. They all smiled back at me. After a pause (I'm sure most of them did not speak English well), one trucker with a Russian-like type accent told me how to exit the yard. After following his directions, I found myself at the other end of the yard with no place to go. So I turned around, wound my way around rail containers, trains, tracks, giant machines that lifted the trucks onto the train cars, and finally reached the exit (another hole-in-the-wall type of situation).
I bob-tailed back to Milwaukee, WI (the rail yard didn't have any empty rail trailers for me) and got home before midnight. A long day!
miles driven = 490
10:10:38 PM
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