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Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Foiled by a Flat
After getting about 3-hours of sleep (yawn!), I started out for Chicago, IL and then dropped my loaded rail container (bound for the state of Washington) at one of the Chicago rail yards.

Then I headed to another rail yard a short distance away (a new one I haven't been to before) and picked up my loaded rail container there. However, one of the tires on the trailer was flat. So, since one of the company's terminals was relatively close by, they sent a fix-it vehicle to repair the flat. While I was waiting, I saw how they put the trailers on to the train cars. One of the loader vehicles was a huge front-end loader type. It's 4-arms grasped the truck trailer and lifted it onto the train car carrier where it was anchored to an attached 5th-wheel frame on the train car. I was impressed with how fast they were able to load cars this way. The other major loader vehicle straddled both the truck trailer as well as the train (2-huge wheels on each side). It also hoisted the rail container onto the train with 4-arms and worked even faster than the other loader vehicle.

Today, it was going towards the 80-degree mark in Chicago and I was sweating mid-morning as I waited for the repair truck. Once the friendly tire guy arrived, he had the flat fixed in no time at all (in fact, he changed both dual tires on the axle so that they would be properly matched). Then I proceeded on without incident and dropped the trailer at the delivery location back in the Milwaukee, WI area.

Tomorrow, I'll have two deliveries in northern Illinois.

miles driven = 249

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