December 16, 2015 Vol. 12 No. 24

I’m going to do something a little different with this issue of the newsletter by publishing just one story. In fact it’s an old one, a feature article that was written for the April 2012 issue of Today’s Trucking. It’s about truck wheel integrity, and particularly about the fasteners we all depend on.

This is a follow-up to my newsletter of two weeks ago, on December 2, when I asked aloud if we were slipping in terms of truck and trailer wheel separations. Statistics seem to show that we are indeed falling behind after improving quite a lot from the wheel chaos of the 1990s.

Two recent wheel-off incidents along Highway 401 in western Ontario, one of which left a car-driving woman dead, prompted Ontario Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca to call on the trucking industry to step up once again and address the problem before more people are hurt or killed. I’m assuming, perhaps wrongly, that the situation isn’t much different elsewhere in North America.

Regardless, I had a fair bit of response to that newsletter so a follow-up seemed like a good idea. When I started wondering what to write, I realized I couldn’t improve much on the piece I wrote three years ago. Why re-invent the… ahem… wheel?

But before I get to that, an announcement is in order, and it pleases me no end.

NEW MAINTENANCE CONFERENCE! Well, it’s both old and new, called the Canadian Fleet Maintenance Summit. That’s ‘CFMS’ for short, but it will bear little resemblance to that past staple of our trucking world. It’s set to go in Toronto next spring, April 13 to be exact, in conjunction with our Truck World 2016 show which runs on the 14th through 16th.

It will be produced by my company, Newcom Business Media, which not only publishes Today’s Trucking, but also Truck News and Motortruck Fleet Maintenance (coming early next year) magazines nowadays.

And the cool thing is that we’re doing it in conjunction with the PIT Group, the Automotive Transportation Service Superintendents Association (which produced the original CFMS for a few decades), the Canadian Transportation Equipment Association, the Ontario Trucking Association, and the Transportation Maintenance & Technology Association.