On Tuesday November 10,2009 Dan Rather followed up last months report on the trucking industry. The first report titled “queen of the road “ aired on October 20th, 2009. We wrote a little piece on it then so we won’t go into it here. Here is a link to that reported article titled, “10 Reasons To Choose Our Truck School.” Rather focused on schools and training in his first trucking report so it was posted on ruck driving school blog last month.
This time around rather put together a meeting at “Willie’s Place” at Carl’s Corner, Texas, some 60 miles south of Dallas. Willies place is a truck stop so the setting was little more trucker friendly this time around.
Rather met with Derek Leathers, COO for Werner Enterprises; Tim Dean, a Werner driver; Miles Verhoef, an owner-operator from Wisconsin, Todd Spencer, OOIDA executive vice president. The show was a lot more interesting. The overall consensus is that more training is needed before a driver is given a CDL license and sent on their way. Werner Execs also pointed out the fact that many large carriers don’t allow freshly licensed individuals to drive without first receiving extensive company training. Pointing this seemed to put Dan Rather’s broadcast last month in question. He seemed to generalize all trucking companies in his first show. This time it seemed like large professional carriers were separated from the negativity.
CR England follows this model of re-training people who have a license but do not have driving experience. There is a big difference between a driver that has passed the licensing exam and a driver that has trained with CR England for 90 days.
Hdnet doesn’t seem to have any footage and neither does Hulu, so here is a link to the raw text transcript from Hdnet if you missed the show.
http://www.hd.net/transcript.html?air_master_id=A6511&pd=danrather