Back in the late 80's to the early 90's I used to pull doubles like the ones pictured in the Watkins pic thru California when I was transporting frieght for Sears & Roebuck. We had tight time schedules and if you traveled 65mph, you were late...even thought dispatch claimed that all the loads dispatched at 45mph. We used to supply all the Sears Catalog stores in Northern Caifornia and thought-out the Northwest States until Sears decided close down the catalog division. They feared K-Mart as their biggest competitor back then and were looking for ways to cut costs. That pretty much put me out off job. Man I hated to see that go, we made a lot money back in those days doing that.
I don't miss pulling the doubles tho.... It's a lot of work when you gotta break the set down every time you make a delivery, or worse yet, when somebody gives bad directions and you end up down a dead-end street with no turn around. It's nearly impossible to back a set in a straight line for any distance.
I had one time when making a delivery at a Boing location, I kicked off my rear trailer & con-gear in an empty parking lot whilst I was uloading the front trailer. During that time (around 5:00am and it was still dark out) shift change had come about. And when I went back to collect the second trailer I found it buried in a sea of cars. I mean these idiots even parked under the nose of the trailer and even behind it in between my dolly and the rear of the trailer itself. I mean I literaly had maybe a foot of clearnce on each end. And to make matters even more interesting, I was driving a 377 Peterbuilt Conventional with about a 250" wheelbase that pretty much spanned the width of the isle way between the parked cars when attempting to back under the trailer at a 90 degree angle. It took every bit of 45 minutes to yank that trailer out and the whole while people are zipping up & down the lane honking their horns at me and yelling obsenities because I'm blocking their right of passage. Like there isn't another isle way that they can choose?
This parking lot was huge! But I did get her out of there and didn't even touch a single car in the process!
It would be interesting to see if they (a set of doubles - or even triples for that matter) handle the same way in simulation as they do out in the real world...
11-24-2007, 10:50 AM
Linear Mode
