Detachment Can Be Tricky

Published on April 15, 2006 By MasonM In Blogging

I am currently sitting in a "trucker bar" next to the truckstop in Lebanon, IN. I am hauling a cement mixer truck up to MN. Picking this thing up was a bit of a pain as the folks there were no help at all. I walked in and talked to the guy at the counter, telling him that I was there to pick up a truck, and he didn't seem to have any idea what I was talking about.

I called the contact person who turned out to be the owner of the concrete company and asked him where was the truck I was supposed to pick up. He called the idiot at the counter and told him to show me where it was parked. The idiot pointed to a lot with about 50 cement trucks parked in it and said " it's over there". Gee, thanks.

After about 30 minutes of walking around looking at truck numbers I finally found the one I was looking for and pulled my rig around to that spot. I parked and began detaching for the drive on. I am pulling an RGN trailer which is also known as a double drop or "low boy" trailer. The RGN stands for "Removable Goose Neck".

Basically, the front part of the trailer, the "front deck", detaches from the rest so that a vehicle or machine can be driven onto the trailer. It just takes a bit of work to do that. To do a detach one must do the following:

Park the trailer on a level spot and drop the trailer (unhook the tractor from the trailer). This drops the trailer down onto the ground.

Get under the front deck

Remove the air lines and electrical connection between the front deck and bottom deck (very important)

Unpin the steel support plates between the upper and bottom decks and swing them onto the detach holders.

Back the tractor back under the trailer so that the trailer reconnects with the fifth wheel

Place a 6x6 piece of lumber between the upper deck and tractor frame to prevent the upper deck from dropping too low during detach

Release the connecting pin that holds the upper and bottom decks together

Pull the tractor away from the trailer taking the upper deck with it

Once this is done a vehicle or machine can be driven onto the trailer.
http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
This particular truck is actually longer than the bottom deck, or "well", so I had to drive it onto the bottom deck and then climb the front wheels up onto the rear deck. Not ahttp://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:officialn easy task. Keep in mind that the width of the cement truck is just about the same as the trailer so a mistake of a couple of inches one way or the other means driving off the edge of the trailer and flipping the truck on it's side. No pressure there.

I finally got the truck loaded and chained down. Then I had to reattach the trailer. Now this is pretty much the reverse of the detach procedure, the most difficult part is backing the truck up to the trailer so that the upper deck lines up with the bottom deck so that they mate together correctly.

I managed to get everything lined up and secured and am now in Indiana on my way to Minnesota.

Pulling a double drop can be interesting. Many times a driver will forget a step which always leaves him/her in a pickle.

If you forget to unhook the air lines and electrical cables you pull away and break them. That means a very expensive road service call to repair the damage.

If you forget to place the lumber between the upper deck and the truck frame it means dropping the upper deck right against the truck frame which drops it too low to reconnect to the rest of the trailer. This usually results in an expesive road service call just to lift the front deck high enough to mate with the lower deck.

Those are the two most common mistakes a driver makes wen doing a detach.
Truck driving isn't exactly rocket science, but it does often require a certain amount of thought and attention. In between those times I just enjoy doing what I do and take a small amount of pride in knowing that I do it fairly well.

An RGN Trailer:

Comments

MasonM

on Apr 16, 2006

I have no idea how those links got into the article and JU won't give me the option to edit it.

Dr Guy

on Apr 16, 2006

I was wondering about them. I think JU may be just a bit more buggy yet.

Sorry for the hassle. Now I know why you get the big bucks! It is not brainless driving like that. It takes a lot of insight and intelligence. Glad I dont have to remember all of it.

MasonM

on Apr 17, 2006

Yeah, there is more to it than just getting behind the wheel.

I got the cement truck delivered this morning and am now sitting in Albert Lea, MN waiting for a dispatch.

Chaos Manager

on Apr 17, 2006

Hey, Mason! Thanks for this one. I've driven by these trailer's repeatedly (on the road and on the many Army bases I frequent ...

) I've always wondered how they get these tanks and trucks on the lowboy's. Mystery solved.

Thanks!

MasonM

on Apr 17, 2006

You're quite welcome Chaos. That was at least partly my motivation for writing this as I had someone ask me that very question and I realized that many people don't know how RGN trailers work.

I'm on my way to Oshkosh,WI to pick up a military truck going to SC.

foreverserenity

on Apr 20, 2006

Wow M what a lot of detail involved in doing this! It's a good thing you know what you're doing!

Tova7

on Apr 20, 2006

Good grief that is a LOT of work just to get a cement truck up on a trailer.

I don't know how you remember it all...especially since it is just you and while all the benefits are soley yours...so are the mistakes. Ouch.

Thanks for the info...I mentioned once I drove a tractor trailer while in the AF..but it was always a flat bed full of bombs (or occasional trailer of other explosives)...never anything as complicated as all this....I just had to get hooked up to the fifth wheel, get my hoses and lines connected....and head on out...and I ALWAYS had a partner since I hauled explosives...so we checked each others work.

Of course I wasn't getting the big bucks either!

MasonM

on Apr 20, 2006

It gets easier the more times you do it. After the first hundred times or so it's a piece of cake.

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