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Great description of LTL, good read
I have to give credit to ColdFrostyMug for this because I found this link in his profile. The article appears to be 7-8 years old and refers to Consolidated Freightways who is out of business but it is well worth reading if you are curious about LTL.
LTL: A Different World
Less-than-truckload offers structure and stability, but equipment is no-frills.
By Deborah
Lockridge
Senior Editor
Getting home regularly instead of being on the road for weeks at a time. Working for the same company for 20, 30 years instead of hopping from one to another looking for greener pastures. Day cabs. The Teamsters union. Wiggle wagons. Regular runs.
This is the world of less-than-truckload freight. By revenue, LTL makes up 16% of the freight moved in this country — less than half that of the truckload industry at 37%, according to the American Trucking Assns.
The national LTL market is dominated by huge carriers with extensive terminal networks such as Consolidated Freightways, Yellow Freight and Overnite Transportation. But LTL carriers come in all sizes. LTL carriers can be national, regional or intrastate. They can be dry van, refrigerated or flatbed. Some independent owner-operators have even made a successful business by specializing in less-than-truckload shipments.
The LTL Industry
The idea behind less-than-truckload is that you gather small shipments from a number of customers, maybe as many as 20, and consolidate them on one trailer. At large companies, city drivers make the pickups and deliveries. They take their pickup loads to a terminal, where all the pickups from all the local drivers are sorted. Trailers are loaded with freight, made up of shipments going to the same area. Then line-haul drivers take the trailers to their destination terminal.
From there, the trailer may be headed to a break bulk terminal (a large terminal receiving shipments from satellite terminals, to be sorted and consolidated to an intermediate terminal or its final destination) or to a smaller end-of-line terminal at the final destination.
After arriving at the destination terminal, the freight is unloaded, sorted with other loads that have come in that day and again consolidated and loaded on city equipment to be delivered to a certain area of town.
The big national LTL carriers tend to be unionized. ABF Freight System, A-P-A Transport Corp., Consolidated Freightways, New Penn Motor Express, Roadway Express and Yellow Freight System are represented by the Motor Freight Carriers Assn. during Teamster negotiations. These six companies employ 80% of the Teamsters covered by the National Master Freight Agreement.
Overnite Transportation, the largest nonunion LTL, is currently embroiled in a labor dispute with the Teamsters union. The Teamsters have been trying to organize Overnite, terminal by terminal, since 1994. In late October, the union started picketing Overnite terminals all across the country.
Three unionized LTL carriers went out of business this year, including Preston Trucking Co. in Preston, MD, NationsWay Transport Service in Commerce City, CO, and ANR Advance Transportation of Milwaukee.
You will also find LTL operations that are regional. Most of them are nonunion, and they typically operate in certain lanes. You might find a very small company with a couple of dozen trucks that would specialize in one lane, and be able to provide one-day service.
One large regional LTL is Viking Freight. A division of FDX, Viking serves the Western United States, as far east as Colorado. Viking has 64 service centers, or terminals. That compares to several hundred at the large national LTLs. Like other regional carriers, Viking specializes in one- and two-day service. Nearly 70% of its shipments are delivered overnight.
Con-Way is also focused on regional LTL service. It has three regional carriers: Con-Way Western Express, Con-Way Central Express and Con-Way Southern Express. However, because they operate under one company, during the last few years they have been offering service between the regions.
Similarly, USFreightways has five regional LTLs: USF Holland, USF Red Star, USF Bestway, USF Reddaway and USF Dugan. They all focus on overnight and second-day delivery.
Witte Bros. Exchange in Troy, MO, is an example of a smaller LTL carrier. Witte Bros. has 90 trucks it uses to haul refrigerated LTL freight. The company hauls fresh and frozen perishables for smaller St. Louis-area food companies, and guarantee deliveries within the week. The company has between 250 and 300 deliveries each week. Every driver is home two days every week. Unlike large LTL operations, Witte drivers pick up and deliver their own loads, all over the country.
Today, the lines are blurring between different types of trucking. Where once LTL, truckload and expedited services were all considered very separate types of businesses, today one company may do all three.
Con-Way, for instance, has a small truckload division, and also an expedited division, Con-Way NOW. The portion of USFreightways’ revenue from businesses other than LTL is expected to expand from 15% in 1998 to 25% next year.
“Our company does a lot of expedited freight and air freight forwarding,” says Mike Brown, spokesman for Consolidated Freightways. “More and more companies like ours are becoming multifaceted and provide any kind of transportation solution. We run truckload where customers request or demand it, as well.”
Hauling LTL
Depending on the company, the terminal and the run the driver has, the linehaul driver may deliver the trailer to the next terminal, turn around and come home. Or he might “butt heads” with another driver, exchange trailers or the whole rig and turn around and come back to his own terminal. These are also called “turns” or “relays.” Or he might deliver the trailer, spend the night in a hotel or bunkhouse and come back with another load the next day.
Many LTL linehaul truckers at larger companies have regular routes, usually called “bid runs.” They have a regular departure time and usually the same destination. They’re called “bid runs” because drivers get to “bid” on what runs they want, usually each year, depending on their longevity with the company.
Tom Hawks, an 18-year driver for Overnite Transportation and American Trucking Assns. Driver of the Year, is one of those bid-run drivers. He leaves Memphis, TN, each weeknight about 8 p.m. with his set of doubles. In Cookeville, nearly 300 miles away, he meets in a parking lot with another Overnite driver from the Gaffney, SC, terminal. They switch loads, and Hawks brings the Memphis-bound trailers back to his own terminal. He gets back into town each day about 7 a.m.
Some LTL companies run sleeper teams. “They might drive from California to Memphis, taking turns and shifts, then lay over and bring a load back in the succeeding days,” says CF’s Brown.
Instead of regular “bid” runs, drivers may choose to work on the “extra” or “variable” board. These drivers have a variable schedule. When they deliver a trailer to one terminal, they are then dispatched to another one. But even these drivers typically get home far more often than the average truckload driver.
New drivers typically work the extra or variable board until they build up seniority. Others prefer it to the more boring bid runs. “More money can be made on the extra board, as the legal hours of service can be used each week,” says Bob Etherton of Joplin, MO, a city driver for Roadway.
At smaller terminals or smaller companies, the work may not be divided as much. For instance, Etherton says at Roadway, city drivers at smaller terminals load their own freight for delivery or put their pickup freight on the outbound trailers. They also do the hostling (hooking up the trailers to the road tractors) for the road drivers as they arrive and depart.
At smaller companies, one driver may do it all — pickup, deliver and drive long-haul. For these drivers, and for city drivers with large LTLs, the ability to deal with people is a must.
“The diversity can make it interesting,” says Marti Driskell, who has worked as a supervisor at an LTL company as well as an LTL driver and truckload owner-operator. “You might be unloading at a large distribution center in the morning, and then on to a little old couple from New Jersey who winter in Florida and had their truck and 14 boxes of personal items sent common carrier. You can go from an industrial park with docks to a classy neighborhood where you dodge little white poodles and overhanging trees.”
With more pickups and deliveries, you have to deal with more people and have more deadlines and customers to juggle. You might have 10 to 20 consignees, and an equal number of shippers. “You might have a pallet of parts for a machine that is critical to the day-to-day operation of a company,” Driskell says. “If something happens and you are late — there was a fatal accident on I-80 that closed the road for hours, or roads were closed due to an ice storm — you can multiply the stress level by however many drops you have onboard.”
“Unless one just runs linehaul, from terminal to terminal, handling the customers is critical in LTL,” Driskell says.
Carriers that dominate the national LTL market — ABF, CF Roadway and Yellow — tend be unionized. Most regional LTL fleets are nonunion.
Pros and Cons
LTL carriers typically do not have the turnover problem that the truckload industry experiences. Most large LTL companies boast that their drivers have been with them an average of 20 or 30 years. Nor do they have large-scale hours-of-service violations, because the terminal networks and runs are set up to conform with the driving-time rules.
Traditionally, the LTL industry has been heavily unionized, with Teamster-negotiated pay and benefits. The nonunion companies tend to be very competitive in their pay, although often lower than the unionized companies.
For linehaul drivers, pay is usually based primarily on mileage. For city drivers, it’s hourly.
“My present pay under the National Master Freight Agreement is $18.81 per hour, with overtime after eight hours,” says Etherton, who works Monday through Friday as a city driver. “Road pay is up to 49 cents per mile, and hourly pay for hours on duty not driving is about the same as city pay.” Etherton says a road driver can earn $80,000 if he runs steady, while city drivers can earn $50,000 or more with some overtime and be home every night and on weekends.
At large LTL companies, “the road driver doesn’t have to pickup or deliver at the customer’s door, so they don’t have the hassles that the truckload drivers have,” says Etherton.
Loading or unloading are rare for LTL linehaul drivers. In fact, says Tilton Gore at Viking Freight, “except for hazardous materials they have to know about, what’s in the trailers is pretty much irrelevant.”
Those long waits to load or unload that are the bane of the truckload industry aren’t often found in LTL. City drivers are close to the terminal and can call dispatch if there is a delay at the dock. Dispatch can send you on to the next stop and cover the pickup or delivery with another driver, or you can return when there is no wait. “Shippers know this, and won’t try to make an LTL driver wait too long,” Etherton says. “They know the truckload driver usually doesn’t have a choice but to wait.”
While the equipment is well-maintained, LTL trucks typically are not appointed as luxuriously as a top-of-the-line OTR rig. If Peterbilts with custom sleepers are your thing, you can probably forget LTL. Hawks, for example, drives an International tractor with a 330-horsepower engine governed at 65 mph. Most LTL rigs are day cabs.
Depending on the company and the run, you might not even be driving the same tractor all the time. “Slip seating” involves switching drivers. Other companies, such as Viking, have assigned equipment and simply switch trailers on “turn” runs.
As an LTL linehaul driver, you’ll likely be pulling doubles — even triples in Western states. “You can’t let those trailers be wiggling back there,” says Hawks. “That’s why we call them wiggle wagons. You can’t back up, so you have to be real careful about where you get off and go to a truckstop. There’s no way to turn these things around sometimes.”
LTL trucks typically are not appointed as luxuriously as a top-of-the-line OTR rig.
For a truckload driver who likes seeing the country, an LTL bid run could get monotonous. “It’s kind of a tedious thing,” says Hawks. Linehaul LTL drivers also typically run at night, as Hawks does, so the load can get to the terminal the next day in time to be sorted out for the P&D drivers to deliver.
Some drivers, however, like the structure and consistency of knowing where they’re going to be every day.
“It’s a more structured environment, and they’re home regularly in most instances,” says Joe Deluca, spokesman for Con-Way. “The type of individual that wants to work for an LTL company enjoys that type of environment, and will typically not move [from company to company] as often as a more entrepreneurial truckload person will.”
Perhaps the best benefit of working LTL, however, is that you tend to be home far more regularly than long-haul truckload drivers. Whether it’s every night as a city driver, every day or every other day as a linehaul driver for a large LTL or once a week at a smaller company, this is a big plus, and probably the chief reason turnover at LTLs is so low.
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