What is a tankwagon?

No it’s someone who goes around with a class b fuel truck and fuels fleet trucks and other things for people. At least I hauled a straight truck once for a company on my lowboy and that’s what I was told!

 

Out west you'll see a lot of truck and trailers that get mixed up as doubles. Very few O/O or company trucks run doubles out west unless they are super tankers. You'll see 95% of the companies run truck and trailers. That's having a tank mounted to the frame of the power unit and then attaching a drawbar to a trailer. You can carry around 8500-9000 gallons of gasoline per load. Some companies out west have made up the super tanker and modified a small truck and trailer. They installed a drop axle right behind the steers so the truck could load up to 4850 gallons and 7600 gallons could be loaded on a 4 axle trailer for a total of 12450 gallons per load. They all look like a set of doubles but if you look real quick you'll see there's no fifth wheel and the truck pivot better then any other truck out there.

 

We called all tankers 'tankwagons' on the East Coast...

 

I used to pull rm tanker doubles out west, just called them tankers or doubles. lol

It was pretty common to call and set of doubles, wiggle wagons.

 

It’s a bobtail with a tank mounted. Usually have 1 or 2 hose reels for gas and or diesel. I liked it because I like to stay active. I also really fell out of love with putting in the miles. Some jobs are fleet fueling and some are delivering to farms and such climbing up a ladder and filling a 500g gas tank with a 1000g red diesel tank next to it. Really fun job.

 

It's called a truck and trailer and it's called that mainly because there is no fifth wheel. But make no mistake out west CA,WA,OR,NV they are called truck and trailers because there are really no doubles anywhere hauling petroleum products. Plus the state weight limit allows those individual states to set their own limit. So you see super tankers in WA,OR,UT,and NV and those vehicles weight over 120,000lbs.

 

When I ran truck and trailer you’d often hear guys say my wagon referring to the trailer. Or when I did transfer dump I’d ask dispatch if I could leave the wagon at the job site. Maybe the OP heard something like this? Dunno. I see rocky sets in Idaho and Montana hauling fuel. A Trains? A semi tanker pulling a California 2 axle trailer (standard truck and trailer wagon). I’d definitely believe that was 120k gross.