After spending two days on the unloads, we got our first opportunity to drive since we’d arrived. There’s a new law in TX that states before you’re allowed to drive a tanker, you have to be certified to drive a tanker, which is really back-azzwards because you obtain this ‘certification’ by pulling a dry-van. So we drove dry-vans for two days to re-familiarize ourselves with shifting and driving a big rig, before testing out and actually driving tankers. WOW!… what a difference. Driving dry-vans felt like being behind the wheel of a Cadillac compared to the tankers. Filled with water, as you might imagine the sloshing and the surge was everything it was hyped to be. The biggest surprise came on a slight downhill portion of the interstate, where the water felt like it was on my back, pushing me down the road. It’s something I’ve since become accustomed to, and have to be mindful of on long downhill stretches. The momentum of the surge can push the truck to speeds in excess of 75mph if you allow it.
I had one instructor working with me beginning with the unloads through the end of training, and I enjoyed his sense of humor. He had names for the three tankers we were training with: “Sergio,” as in ‘surge-e-o,’ “Miss Wallbanger,” and the heaviest of the three, “The Godfather.” The Godfather beat me up the least, but when its surge did strike, if felt like a 50lb sledgehammer slamming into the back of my seat.
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| Me & Mr. Leo Williams, trainer extraordinaire |
We drove the tankers the rest of the week, tested out in those, spent Saturday reviewing anything we felt deficient in, and preparing for the next phase of training, the two-week OTR phase with a trainer, or in Schneider-land, a ‘trainer engineer’ (TE).
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| Our four primary instructors. |
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