Monday, August 3, 2009

July 28

Left this morning at 0500 and drove to the receiver in Brockton, MA arriving at 0730. They began unloading us right away and finished at 0815. We still have not received our next load assignment. We asked the receiver where we could park and he told us about a K-Mart shopping center that has a diner. We left the receiver and went to the K-mart to park and have breakfast at the diner. We received our load assignment while eating breakfast. We are supposed to pick up a load of candles from their factory in South Deerfield, MA and take them to Charlotte, NC. by tomorrow. When we arrived at the candle factory, there was a pre-loaded trailer waiting for us, so all we had to do was drop out empty trailer and hook up to the loaded trailer. We hooked up to the new trailer and left for Charlotte at 1100. Our route took us up and down hills on I-84 through PA. and NY. I use the cruise control as much as possible, and we started noticing the engine running rough as we climbed a hill. This noise continued for a while until I lost power in 10th gear. I dropped my speed to 55 MPH and dropped to 9th gear and the engine ran fine. My co-driver called our breakdown department to find out where we could take the truck to have it looked at. The gave us a Freightliner location in Scranton, PA. So I kept moving along in 9th gear for about 75 miles. When we reached our exit for Freightliner, that's when we noticed we had major problems. I could not down shift into any other gear, luckly, I use 4th gear to start from a stop and we still had that gear only because 4th and 9th gear are located in the same slot. I was able to get the truck into 4th gear at the end of the exit ramp and creep along until we reached the Freightliner location. The Freightliner location knew we were coming, however they told us they could not look at the truck until after 1300 tomorrow. They told us to drop our trailer in one location and park the truck in another location. This is when we found out we did not have reverse. We dropped the trailer in an out of the way location and parked the truck. Another LCT driver will come tonight or tomorrow and pick up our loaded trailer and take it to Charlotte. We spent the night in a nearby hotel.

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