Tri-State Motor Transit TSMT, real driver review.

You forgot to mention the joy of being handed an 8 inch pile of Hazwaste manifests at Clean Harbors and spending 2 hours adding continuation sheets while your hand cramps up and figuring out which of the 8 classes of Hazwaste are incompatible with each other. Then there’s the Orica death drive: 5 drops over 3 days with constant attendance, each drop located in the middle of nowhere and difficult to locate and one missed turn sends you on a cross country trek on country roads with bridges rated for 15000 lbs less than what you weigh. My personal favorite were the loads that pick up in La Baie, Quebec that only seem to do any shipping in the dead of winter during polar vortex events. You can also count on getting a lot of e-commerce loads and UPS traveling over I 80 in Wyoming in December. TSMT has it’s upside but if you are going to write a review make sure you tell the whole story.

 

they also have a "ghost fleet", of experienced company drivers, hauling super secret loads.

no one but a selected few in dispatch, knows about the whereabouts of those loads.

Ghost drivers

 

I was there 2 years and never saw any ghosts.

 

that's cuz theyz be invisible.....

 

Truth be told, becoming a “Ghost Driver” was/is my goal. I really wanted to get loads to area 51 and haul around UFO debris and do things like that but instead I end up hauling arms and ammunition. Maybe some day.

 

If you are processing the paperwork for a clean harbors load in 15 minutes then you are not doing it correctly. I have personally seen a stack about 18 inches high at the Clive location where the office girls did not bother to add continuation sheets and each one had to be filled out by hand and it took my wife and I two hours together to complete their paperwork. TSMT is not all roses and puppy dogs. My wife and I are both experienced drivers and college graduates and that does not help at all when you are trying to locate an Orica facility in the middle of nowhere at 3 AM where there are no signs even telling you which way to turn and your GPS doesn’t even recognize the dirt road that you are supposed to go down. I worked with a team at tri-state on one of those La Baie loads and just heard that they came to my company because they were fired from Tri-state, according to them without cause and just prior to being able to get a bonus worth many thousands of dollars. We left Tri-state shortly after getting an email from John Wilbur threatening to cancel our contracts if we refused to haul toxic waste. When we finished our first year driving with Watkins Shepard we were getting $.44 a mile and logging 5500-6000 miles a week which ended up being pretty close to what we were making as company drivers hauling sensitive DOD loads and deadly toxic waste. The guaranteed pay is nice but if you are driving a decent truck and getting a decent rate per mile you can easily make as much or more hauling something else that won’t kill you if it leaks and doesn’t require you to babysit it 24/7.

 

Midnightrider you sound as if you really have nothing but complaints so why even but your penny in the hat. Robin let us know how much fun you have.

 

He's just telling his side of the story. Your mileage may differ.