Working In Night Driving

I want to start working in night driving and don't have the luxury to park at shipper/receiver like Old School does. Usually staged about 1 hour away. Let's say your reset ended at 0800hrs. Your next pickup is at 1100hrs or 1600hrs or 2000hrs. Solo driver. I drive for example in the Midwest to east coast and back. Trying to avoid construction and traffic for example. Newbie level. Trying to maximize on miles. Thanks in advance.

What are you asking?

If your dispatched a call pickup in the 1000hrs and you want to work in night driving, what is the best way?

Honestly I am not sure how to answer your question because I am not sure what you are asking. OTR trucking is highly variable when it comes to sleep schedule and drive times and depends entirely on the delivery appointment time. However if you prefer night driving you can plan accordingly based on your delivery time and the required distance from the shipper to the receiver.

Charles, your question is a good one, but it has so many variables to it that it is difficult to even word the question properly. I think you are going to have to get a little more experience under your belt to really grasp the concepts needed to work all this out. You have got to consider each load on it's own set of variables. There is no set formula or magical rules you can go by to make this happen. So much is going to depend on your pick-up and delivery schedules, and also your re-caps or available hours. One thing that helps is once you've been to some of the places before you will learn little nuances about how they work and that will help you tremendously. Recently I delivered to a large steel warehouse in Pittsburgh, and I knew that when I got there I was going to be out of hours and need to park on their property. The person I spoke to on the phone told me they did not allow parking on the property. I had been there before and it is a large facility with multiple buildings. I remembered that at one of the buildings they would allow you to park and sleep there. So I stuck with my plan and drove through the night getting there early in the morning and delivering. Sure enough the building I had to deliver too had no area to park at. So I rolled about two blocks down the street and parked at one of their other buildings where they had let me park before. What I'm getting at is that some of the places that you think you can't park at may very well be able to accommodate you, but you've got to learn the little secrets about each place. This is a hallmark of top tier drivers, they know how to get things done that other drivers think cannot be done.

Let me try to give you something to think about to help you get your gears turning on this stuff. Let's just say that you had a pick-up scheduled for eight o'clock in the morning Monday and the trip was 1,000 miles away scheduled to deliver at 10 a.m. Wednesday. We will assume you cannot sleep at the shipper or receiver, but you would really like to try driving this load at night. Let's also assume you slept at a truck stop about an hour away from the shipper. Okay about 6:30 Monday morning you log yourself on duty and do your pre-trip, then you roll on over to your shipper, get loaded, and now it is 9:30 a.m. What would most drivers do now? They would hit the road rolling and try to use up their available hours. Why not just drive half an hour or so to the nearest truck stop and shut down, put yourself on the sleeper line and rest for the day? Then when it gets to be about 8:30 in the evening you can start driving at night. Okay so you start driving at 8:30 Monday night. You drive as much as you can and put in about six hundred miles. You took a couple of thirty minute breaks along the way and now you are shutting down at approximately 8:30 Tuesday morning. Okay, now you will get yourself some rest and put your clock on the sleeper berth line.

Now you've just got 400 miles remaining on this load. You should be able to do that in eight hours with ease. So count backwards from your delivery appointment time of 10 a.m. Wednesday and you know you've got to hit the road hard an heavy at about one o'clock in the morning. After logging your pre-trip, this allows you to get there just early enough to get in your thirty minute break at the receiver and still enables you to have time on your clock to leave that location after getting unloaded and hopefully make it to your next pick-up which you have pre-planned on your Qualcomm. That's how the "go to guys" handle this stuff, and once you've established yourself as one of those valuable members of the team you will have pre-planned loads before you finish that last load.

Even with the above scenario you may need to allow for big city traffic or other delays, but I'm just trying to spell out the way for you so that you can study on it and maybe start to realize the principles of how to get this kind of thing done. I'm hoping I triggered your creative imagination and helped you see how to make a transition into driving at night if that is what you want to do.

Thank you very much to both moderators who took on my question. Makes total sense with the examples you gave. I will exercise these examples you have given. In my past you hit the button on the head with the mistake I've been doing running hard after the load. I hosed it twice trying to do the night shifting driving but was just barely able to recover the the arrival time.