Iron to Asphalt

I didn’t always want to be a truck driver. I have usually been sure that what I wanted to do was what I was doing at the time, but when I no longer wanted to do what I was doing I just did something else.

It is difficult to believe that with all the options available to us as a society today that people still choose not to try new things.

Go to college and get a job is no longer the answer, but we don’t need to talk about school loans and job prospects here. I will just tell you the way I came into trucking.

I worked for the railroad in 2019, one of the class one big outfits. I won’t say which one, but I live in the south and have delivered coal to the ships out in Norfolk, if that helps.

Newly married and making alright railroad money, I decided I would take out a loan and buy a house two doors down from me, renovate it and rent it out. I closed on the house and was laid off within three months. I used my railroad unemployment benefits to keep the bills paid, but we barely got by while I worked night and day to finish renovating the home I had purchased. Underestimating costs and renovation needs is an extreme understatement, and my wife and I realized we were gonna need me to make a real income as soon as possible to keep from slipping further into debt.

I was fortunate to be laid off from the railroad, it turns out, because the state offered a grant to all of us (I was one of dozens of railroaders who would see each other in the unemployment office) to get our CDL licenses through the local community college.

I got the grant and borrowed the rest from my dad, for a total of 3500 and 1500 respectively. Spent the next month in class 8 hours a day, commuting an hour and a half each way and reviewing podcasts and my own voice recordings of the study material the whole drive.

I passed the test and months went by, working on the house and wondering when the railroad would try to bring me back. My wife worried but my unemployment paid more than any minimum wage job (again, railroader) so my only decision was do I want to be on a two hour call 24/7 again or do I want to rejoin the living and correct my circadian rhythms.

Finally the railroad called and left me a message to return to duty, and by the contract I had 30 days to respond. For 28 days I worked my fingers to the bone attacking my home renovations (might cover the details in a future post) but finally we decided that it would be better to choose the devil we don’t know since the one we knew was the Railroad.

I made one phone call on a Thursday, got an offer and a rental car scheduled, and called the Trainmaster that same day to let him know I was a truck driver now and they could called the name below mine on the seniority list (knowing full well my buddy Nick had already gotten a good job at the steel mill).

I left for Columbia South Carolina on a Sunday to start my next chapter of life as a flatbed truck driver at TMC.