Pusher truck 'Bulldog' helps keep I-5 open and freight on the move during severe winter conditions on Siskiyou Summit, the highest pass on I-5 in southern Oregon.
Instead of shafting the trucker by making him call a wrecker wich will cost his company or him thousands of dollars the state DOT is actually helping out!! 👏👏👏 Oregon DOT rocks, thank you❤
I do agree with this idea. But....you just know there's a team of lawyers waiting to pounce. I assume this is why it's a rare thing these days to see a state owned vehicle touch another vehicle in a situation like this. With everybody suing for anything now.....yea.
@@matt9c1 I seriously hate how people can’t even do common sense, courteous things just because they fear getting sued. Said lawyers should be sent to chain up those rigs on the cold shoulder of that busy highway
@@travisnull273 Yeah and too many trucking companies that spit on the old hands and pay a bare minimum for new drivers, which ensure the turnover is high and the experience is low. I stopped driving about 10 years ago. Too many steering wheel holders and supertruckers. Add to that the four wheelers who will cut in front of you and slam on their brakes to make their exit, and I had more than enough.
My dad used to do this, over this same stretch of I-5, back when it was a new road in the late '60s. He worked for LASME freight, out of Yreka, driving a company-built single-screw Freightliner cabover, with a massive concrete block mounted on the frame rails right over the drive axle. He said he had a lot of fun doing this job.
@@gabrielhernandez-sg5iz He has said it was hard work, but he had a lot of fun along the way. He has many stories. At times, he'd push all the way north to Wolf Creek, Oregon, then turn around and back to Yreka. The winter of 1968 (the year I was born) was especially bad for snowfall in that Southern Oregon / Northern California corridor of I-5.
1:50 “A lot of these drivers realize that momentum is actually their friend.” Unfortunately, a lot of non-commercial drivers don’t. Every Winter I see countless people dumping their car off the side of the road or sliding backwards down it because they chicken out at the top of the hill and press the brakes instead of keeping on the gas. Keeping traction while still moving is a LOT easier than trying to gain new traction from a dead stop.
@@kevinerbs2778 I cannot stand using ABS when driving in the snow, I pull the fuse if I have to. Manual Cadence braking with the ability to actually lock the wheels for very short periods of time is much more effective that relying on ABS, which in certain instances just won't stop you or slow you down enough to regain control. You end up being a complete passenger.
Can you all do a Livestream for part of a shift sometime? You might be surprised how many people would tune in, especially if there is a copilot in the cab responding to viewers questions!
Hilarious that I've never seen National Lampoons yet I knew exactly who you were talking about. Bill Murray's brother Brian Murray. I had to go look it up but sure enough he was the boss in that movie. He has such a distinct voice that I notice him every time he plays a bit character in a tv show.
I know these guys appreciate him. Time is money in the trucking business and it sucks to be late for scheduled delivery. He saved these drivers and the companies a lot of money.
As young adults who worked on our cars, we had floor jacks and repaired sets of chains. To make pocket money when it snowed, and we knew things on the Siskiyous were tumultuous, we'd grab the floor jack and chain-up a few cars. Next we'd head to Callahan's interchange and watch the semis trap car against the guard rail, drink a beer or two, and laugh all the way down Old 99, back to Ashland. What a mess it was sometimes. No one got physically hurt, and always felt sorry for the staters and the wreckers, who had to untangle the mess. 1964-6.
You guys do great work on those passes, I go over this one twice every week, Thank you for your dedication to keeping the roads flowing, it'd be nice if CalTrans learned from y'all 👍👍
That is a wonderful service. Much needed, thank you. I've always say it out under those conditions, especially with a single scree and or doubles. May God Bless you.
Really?!?!?!? Yeah out of 28 years I did doubles for 22 years, they were being called joints back in the 60s and 70's mainly, but people still would use that expression now and then during that 22 years.
I live in upstate NY and we see a lot of snow, have my class A since 1994, and I’ve never seen a push truck. That’s awesome. We do have a pretty good highway system here in NY. Not too many long, steep grades on the major highways I can think of, even through the Adirondacks, but some of our secondary roads have some steep grades. Our roads get a lot of potholes. Some teeth rattlers
I’ve always wanted to say thank you to these guys because without them and the plows places like Cabbage or Snoqualmie Pass in Washington would have things shut down all winter
I've never seen a truck like this anywhere or even heard of something like it. The thing looks epic too, just a empty frame truck pushing a loaded semi up a grade. It's nice to see DOT actually helping.
This week it snowed pretty heavily on the A21, I'm from Germany, and there were a bunch of trucks and card on the right lane "going" uphill, I took the left lane to keep my momentum going and I got all the way up no problem
I use to live in Mullan, Idaho, at the bottom of Lookout Pass on I-90. My friends and I would chain up all 4 wheels on out 4x4 trucks and push big rigs up the hill for 10 bucks. And the truckers were happy to pay it. They called us vultures because we would wait for a truck to start loosing traction, then come up behind them and push them up the hill. We built our push bars to fit between the safety bumpers on the trailers.
