There’s something special about the world of heavy hauling. A kind of prestige based on the tough loads, the big weights. There’s certainly pride amongst the drivers, though not arrogance, as if they feel their brand of trucking demands a little more of them than pulling white boxes along the highway would. And it does demand more, sometimes lots more. In fact, for some, that’s exactly why they’re doing it. Take Jason Levac, for example.

“I like it because it’s a personal challenge,” says the 25-year-old lease operator for the heavy-haul division of Mullen Trucking, based in Aldersyde, Alta. “Just using the multi-axle trailers, there’s a lot of standing back and looking at it and then doing some figuring. Any time I do a regular load anymore it’s just a no-brain thing. You put it on the trailer and tie it down and away you go. With the oversize loads, you’re always thinking, because so many things can go wrong. And you get to see a lot more country. You get different routes all the time, and you get to put up with construction and states that will route you into a bridge that you can’t go across or get under. I like it because it’s different, it’s not something everybody does.”

Levac is young to be doing what he’s doing. He’s Mullen’s youngest owner-operator, hauling mostly over-dimensional Caterpillar equipment out of Illinois, plus oilfield skids and a lot of crane moves mixed in, all of it on-highway. He and his 1999 Kenworth W900 have been on multi-axle combinations — mostly nine-axle rigs (three-axle tractor with six-axle trailer) — for a year and a half. Before that he was with another Mullen heavy-haul division but strictly on the oilpatch side of things, and almost all of it off-road.

Even on-highway, he pulls some pretty mean loads.

“On our nine-axles we can scale here in Alberta up to 198,000 pounds during normal road conditions, when there’s no bans on. In winter, you can go a little bit more,” Levac explains. “As for size, we hauled rock-truck boxes up to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta out of Laredo, Texas. They’re 32 feet wide and the box weighs 110,000 pounds. It takes about 14 days to get loaded and get up to Fort McMurray with one of them on.”

That’s heavy hauling, but it’s by no means extraordinary. A couple years back Mullen’s Premay Equipment group hauled piece of oilfield equipment called a coker from Edmonton north to a Suncor project in the oil sands region near Fort McMurray. A coker, in simple terms, is the gizmo that turns sand into crude oil. This one weighed 1,650,000 pounds. That’s right: one-million, six-hundred-fifty-thousand pounds. Now that’s heavy hauling.

Typically, you could say anything that demands a lowboy trailer should be considered part of the heavy-haul market (or “light-heavy,” as the boys at Premay say), but ask around and you’ll find there are two main sectors. One involves shuttling earth-moving and construction equipment, meaning big bulldozers and cranes and the like. The other is “industrial” work, which involves freight such as tanks and buildings and transformers, among many other awkward loads. In most cases, the rigs you’ll find in legal and over-dimensional on-highway work — local or long distance — range from fairly ordinary five-axle types to the nine-axle combination that Jason Levac pulls.

Since there’s a certain expertise required, it’s tough for a young guy like Levac to break in. It’s also a challenge for recruiters to find experienced drivers who are suited to the work, says Paul Kingma, vice-president and operations manager at Empire Transportation in Grimsby, Ont.

“We’ve sometimes got trucks we can’t fill because we can’t get the people,” he says. “Some days you’ll see six or eight trucks sitting here not moving just because I can’t get people to drive them. We’ll use driver services occasionally to fill in, but the driver services can’t get people either.

“Most of the people we’re getting in here now are right out of school,” says Kingma. “If we were just pulling vans, or all we hauled was steel bars, we could lower the bar a little bit. But our guys, one day they’re hauling plate steel and the next they’re hauling a Cat D8. You have to have the experience to go with it.”

Kingma says Empire looks for drivers with border-crossing experience and a history of oversize work. “A lot of the guys we’ve taken on lately haven’t had that so we’ll train them and work them in slowly,” he says. “We really want that three or four years of experience, which makes it tough for these young guys just coming out of school. If everybody wants experience, where are they supposed to get it?”

It’s not just raw driving skill and good judgment that matter to companies like Empire and Mullen. The quality they value most in a driver is patience. Heavy hauling demands permits for every jurisdiction you run through, and drivers deal with provincial, state, county, and city curfews wherever they go. Usually, the move is limited to daylight hours Monday to Friday, but not during the morning or afternoon rush hours. On a short winter’s day, actual working time may be limited to between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.

A driver needs the ability to manage his time, to plan his attack on all those curfews, says Bill Long, Levac’s boss and a veteran ex-driver who co-ordinates Mullen’s heavy-haul work.

“You’re waiting for permits, you’ve got curfews, travel restrictions — there’s a laundry list,” he says. “You’ve got specific curfews to go through certain cities. Take Minneapolis, for instance. You’ve got from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to get through there in winter, so you have a six-hour window. If you hit outside that, you can lose a day’s travel.” It’s a similar situation at the border: if you hit it at 3 p.m., “you’re done ’til 9 the next morning,” Long notes.

Furthermore, each jurisdiction has its own requirements for flags, beacons, pilot cars, and other safety measures. “You have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to keep up,” says Long.
Levac recalls a time when he waited a full week for a permit so he could veer 30 miles out of Maryland. He was holed up in a hotel while bridge and pavement engineers tried to figure out how much weight they’d allow.

“You get to know yourself really good,” Levac says. “I have a fairly shiny truck because I have a lot of time to polish it.”

Heavy-haul work may be mentally taxing for drivers, but it’s also physically demanding. You have to be just a little bit better behind the wheel and with the chain and straps than the average flatdeck hauler because you’re dealing with awkward, heavy freight.

Tough work for sure, but it can be financially rewarding. We’ve heard of lease-operator teams pulling in as much as $35,000 gross in a month. Owner-operators do go broke in this business, but nonetheless, the income potential is pretty good if a bit hard to pin down. That’s because most heavy haulers offer a mix of pay by the hour, by the mile, or by percentage of revenue in the case of an owner-operator, depending on the nature of the move.

Then there are premiums paid for incidentals — things like driving nine-axle rigs instead of six. Some fleets will add bonuses for extra height, another for extra length, and yet another for extra width. As an owner-operator with that kind of work, you might do as well as $1.05 a mile empty and $1.35 a mile loaded before any premiums are applied.

The magnitude of pay, skill, and bureaucracy changes when you step up into oversize loads. That implies more experience, and certainly bigger challenges. Run that nine-axle rig and you could be at $1.50 a mile empty, $2.50 a mile loaded.

Empire offers its company drivers and owner-ops a per-mile or an hourly rate, because some hauls just don’t offer many miles. Drivers also earn the hourly rate if they have to be shut down for a couple of days waiting for a permit. And uniquely, the company pays a premium of three cents a mile for U.S. miles to account for the hit drivers suffer in the exchange rate on the Canadian dollar.

For owner-operators, the higher pay is matched by more expenses. Savvy owner-operators are careful to ask who pays for things like permits, police escorts, pilot cars, and any other extra costs. Permits can range from $10 in Iowa to $250 in Illinois. Pilot cars — and you may need as many as three — cost from 85 cents to a buck a mile, round trip.
And then there’s the wear and tear on the truck. Pull one of those 110,000-pound rock-truck boxes out of Texas to Alberta and you might get all of 3 mpg with your gross weight of maybe 195,000 pounds. Your tires, brakes, and other components will wear sooner, too –indeed, there’s more maintenance generally, even though you might be running empty as much as half the time.

That said, it’s worth noting that Jason Levac’s Kenworth is going up for sale. He figures the latest W900 has a few improvements that will make his life easier, so he’s trading up, which implies that if you’re with the right fleet and have a head for business, you can do just fine in the heavy-haul world.Like a lot of truck operators, Ron Carson has a do-anything, go-anywhere attitude. The owner of Carson Oil & Maintenance in Lampman, Sask., says his business grown because he took on the odd jobs no one else could handle. When your customers are in the oil business, those odd jobs are never light work. In what started as a sideline business, Carson Oil & Maintenance will lay as many as 300 miles of pipeline in Saskatchewan this year.

The key to the company’s versatility is its equipment. Carson operates five twin-steer Kenworth C500s mounted with 42-tonne pickers. “They do everything with them,” says Dwayne Pow of Custom Truck Sales in Regina. “One day they’ll mount a bucket and do powerline work, and then they’ll turn around and lift oilfield equipment and set pump jacks.”

When you work on and off the highway, the challenge is to find a spec that works equally well in the mud and on the pavement. The C500’s tandem front axles — equipped with 18-inch flotation tires — together can carry 36,000 pounds, compared with the typical single axle at 12,000 pounds. A lift axle wouldn’t work, because some of the job sites are too muddy for a lift axle, and Saskatchewan weight laws favour the tandem-tandem configuration. The powertrain is a 460-horsepower Cummins N14 engine, Eaton Fuller 18-speed transmission, and Dana 46,000 rear ends.

The result is the ability to pack on a heavy-duty payload — 82,000 pounds gross — and run legal and comfortably on the highway. Carson says the versatility of the pickers — and the trucks that haul them — mean few jobs are out of reach.