Knight Transportation

kat

New Member
We have worked for Knight out of Portland for 3 months on a dedicated route. Knight personnel are fabulous to work with - respectful, honest and pleasant to the drivers.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT KNIGHT TRANSPORTATION IS IN TRAILER DENIAL.

What does this mean to its drivers? You spend hours of your line 3 and 4 looking for an empty trailer or have to agree to deliver a sorry load in order to go load your next plan. There are plenty of trailers available, but there apparently is no system to know where they are! It would be wonderful to have some plan where the MTs are retrieved and delivered back to the many yards Knight has in order for the driver to be on time. This is a well known problem that management is aware of but fails to correct. The dispatchers give you a list of suspected locations and you and four other trucks drive there and fight over the empty trailer.

The plusses for this firm are endless - good orientation, good equipment, fast pay daily, benefits after 90 days, etc.but the trailer problem is horrendous.

I recommend that you give Knight a try and see how the TRAILER DENIAL affects you!

Kat
 
thats where live loads/unloads are a plus. i drag the same trailer around most of the time and i might get one drop/hook a week. waiting hasn't been a problem so far. shippers/recievers have been pretty quick with me.
 
I do mostly drop and hook with Crete, and the only time so far that there hasn't been an empty to take was a Wal Mart in Palestine, TX. No big deal though, just stopped by the Wilmer terminal on my way to Fort Worth and grabbed one.
 
I suppose if all the drivers did the computer work on where and when they dropped the trailers, that would help a lot. I'm on the road with my husband on the refrigerated side for Knight, and go through that too. It takes all of two minutes to type in what trailer you're dropping where, and dispatch can look it up for you. A lot of drivers I've talked to "don't want to mess with that darn computer"... but if they did, it would save us all some time.
 
use the old tried and true method, put seals on any empty trailers you find, no one else will touch it and if you have enough stragically placed you will never be without one.

I remember my last job as a company driver had a terminal in Columbus Ohio the terminal manager had watched this trailer sitting across from his window for several weeks and decided to see what was up with it, when he finally broke the seal and saw it was empty he was a bit pissed to say the least, when he found out that close to 40% of the sealed trailers were empty he hit the roof,and it was a three story building lol,
Needless to say trailer control became an obsession with him, which in the end worked out good as dispatch knew EXACTLY where all the empties were and we didn't waste time looking for one
 
When I was with big companies, if I felt a trailer was empty (after looking at how it was sitting, looking at the tires, and hitting the sides) I would call dispatch to see if it showed to be loaded. If not, I popped the seal and took the trailer.

Several times, I was in and out of a drop lot while other drivers were sitting around waiting on a trailer.
 
When I was with big companies, if I felt a trailer was empty (after looking at how it was sitting, looking at the tires, and hitting the sides) I would call dispatch to see if it showed to be loaded. If not, I popped the seal and took the trailer.

Several times, I was in and out of a drop lot while other drivers were sitting around waiting on a trailer.
why did a empty trailer have a seal?
 
My co-driver and I have been considering Knight. The trailer issue is surely a drawback, but if they are getting loads, that's a plus. Where we are now, we've been MT for 5 days, trailer attached... NO LOADS! They're telling us it's that dry. We disagree, since we can see trucks running, all around. We're stuck in the Dallas area and I've never seen this place "dead" in the past. One of my brothers lives here(though I haven't seen him) and he says it's busy as usual. I think our FM is upset about something, but we can't figure out what. There's been no mention of problems and no late loads, etc. Things have been okay in general and nobody's been arguing that I know of, but still... NOTHING!

I've almost decided to just go look for a local job and moving out here if that works out for us. Knight wouldn't be local, but it's right down the street from where we're sitting and I saw a hiring sign a few days ago.
 
We are now considering going back to Knight and staying put. We currently work for the largest trucking company in the country and their financials are extremely weak. Plus we haul GM freight. We really do not want to run for a week only not to get paid at the end of the week.
 
We are now considering going back to Knight and staying put. We currently work for the largest trucking company in the country and their financials are extremely weak. Plus we haul GM freight. We really do not want to run for a week only not to get paid at the end of the week.

Who do you drive for now kat ?
Just curious..
 

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