Regular readers may well recall a picture or two featuring this old thermos -- then-owner-operator Scott Reed gave it to me back in early 2017 (it was his backup, with a bit of a busted top but still more or less functional)
Side-step coffee break was the scene again with Buckland, Ohio-based Scott Reed last week down at my hometown Nashville TravelCenters of America downtown. It'd been quite a while since I'd seen Reed, who's back in the saddle, as it were, working over-the-road after several years pursuing other local opportunites, now with three children at home, two of them still in their first few years of life.
Reed had loaded north of town that morning after the Kansas City Chiefs' loss in the Super Bowl the previous night, and over sandwiches (leg of lamb I'd fire-roasted over the weekend) at the deckplate diner behind the cab of the AK Trucking 2019 Kenworth W900L he's piloting, Reed caught me up on his first couple weeks out.
Does he feel at home back behind the wheel? No doubt, he said, though it's a
As the youngest of Reed's children continued to grow the last few years, he'd thought about a return to the road off and on. Then he noticed former Bardstown, Kentucky-based small fleet owner Greg Anderson, whom he'd known for years, was in a bit of an expansion mode with a six-(by-now-seven-)truck fleet based out in Oklahoma. Anderson was in need of a driver, and the pair struck a tentative agreement that would have had Reed come on behind the wheel of one of Anderson's three KW T680s -- all of the owner's trucks are leased on with Woof Trucking out of Yukon, Oklahoma.
"Greg had bought a 2020 W900, and I was going to go into one of the T680s," Reed said, "but when he offered me" the one other W9 in the fleet, "my first thought was, 'Oh, yeah.'" Reed's early years as an owner-operator were spent in a quite similar rig, and this one, though with a decidedly modest, basic white paint scheme, felt just about right at 300-plus wheelbase with a 72-inch aero flattop sleeper, just tall enough to stand comfortably inside.
“Everybody was wondering if I could be a company driver again,” after years as an owner-operator, Reed said. At 50 cents a mile, then 60 after the first year and with access to health and dental among other insurance with the fleet, Reed noted, he's doing fine on the compensation front, with the prospects for getting home every other week or more often, given his Midwest location, too.
