Usually, pups are used in LTL business, then you can do multiple drop & hooks with a variety of different stops by simply dropping one pup & hooking to another.

Very common in LTL business, also you can put more weight on 2 pups than on one trailer. Up here at least.

 

LTL company's haul time sensitive freight. They use pups because they have less than a truck load of freight. Instead of mixing it with all the other freight going in same direction into a 53 foot trailers they load them on pups so the trailers don't have to be loaded and unloaded at every terminal the freight runs through.

It's very rare you have all your freight on the same size pallets so forget pallet size and trailer size, it's irrelevant. A single axle tractor pulling a set of doubles can haul more tonnage than OTR truck. I can't remember the exact numbers but at Conway I think we could legally haul 52k if it was loaded right.

I don't think a set of doubles would be very efficient pulling from one terminal to another? It is more efficient though when you have several different terminals.

 

That's it...sort of. The company I am leased onto uses pups alot as we have alot of small terminals in every dinky little town in the north, so our configurations are mostly Rocky Mountain Doubles, which is a 48 or 53 ft lead, which will go to a larger terminal & a 27-30 ft pup which will be dropped at the small terminal. This works very well as most of the small terminals will only take a pup load of freight & it beats the heck out of sitting around waiting for them to unload you.

As far as the weights go...for me 2 pups haul more than a single trailer & the Rocky configuration is more than a triaxle. Our weight are significantly higher here so no point in mentioning them.

 

No, I've never delivered to UPS/FedEx/etc. But I've been to a number of places where you'd say "No Way". But if you didn't get it in there, you'd be stuck with the load.

From what I'm reading, for us, there would be no additional benefit to going with doubles. I was thinking primarily of the added freight-room. Since much of our freght is the same as many of you mention; oddball sizes with pallets sprinkled throughout the trailer, it seems that the extra headache of unhooking would cost drivers time, among other things.

What do you think?

Steve

 

Once you get familiar with pulling doubles, breaking them and hooking them doesn't take much time at all. After a while you will learn to back the lead with the dolly and then you can just about hook a set of doubles in just about the same amount of time as a 53.

After pulling doubles for a couple years, I prefer to pull doubles than a 53ft.

 

In addition to the cargo space issue you have to consider the weight of what you haul, customer preferences, etc.

Because pups are usually single axle you will not be able to load as much weight into one as you could a tandem axle trailer. In addition you are not going to be able to load a pup to its legal limit and haul it with another pup also loaded to its legal limit as you are still constrained by the 80,000 lb gross that most states go by.

 

If you worked in LTL freight or small package multiple stop kind of stuff it would make more sense. City drivers pick up freight. That freight is all brought back to the home terminal, stripped and reloaded on outbound pups based on destination. Road drivers come in and grab two pups, one for Columbus and the other to St Louis. He goes to Columbus and drops both, one goes to the dock to be sorted and segregated and the other goes the yard where another driver will hook it with a Kansas City trailer. When he gets to St Louis, well you get it! Meanwhile the original driver hooks two Youngstown trailers, one off the dock in Columbus, the other a direct load out of Memphis and returns to Youngstown. Where he then goes home and sleeps in his own bed. On the OH and IN turnpike we can pull triples for even more flexibility. Basically the more headloads we can build with the smaller trailers allows us to move freight through the system faster by not putting every trailer to the dock. You have to understand the network. We have over 200 terminals and at least 15,000 pups. Flexibility is the biggest reason.