Marius' short IRL adventure

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Marius08
Posts: 146
Joined: 26 Apr 2020 14:56
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Marius' short IRL adventure

#1 Post by Marius08 » 01 May 2020 08:29

Hello everyone, I'd like to share some pictures of my (short) real life career as a truck driver. I'm not really known in the communities, I was mostly active on Truckpol and Truckmodshop with screenshots mostly about almost 10 years ago, but I always have been a big fan of these games.

As a little kid Hard Truck 18WOS has kept me hours stuck at the computer, and so did Haulin' and ETS in my teenage years. In fact I played them so much I really wanted to try the real thing, even if I knew this job in real life is a completely different story. :roll:
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Got my licenses in 2016, and I have a close family friend who works for the biggest car transporting company in Italy, which is close to my town. At the time the company had a lot of work and needed many drivers, and they accepted beginners as well.

Even if the company did a training course of 2 weeks for any new driver, car hauling was not really a job for beginners. It's one of the hardest jobs in trucking, there are so many things you always have to be really careful about:
being responsible for transporting new cars, challenging the height/length limit, always loading in any weather condition, driving a 21 meters long truck in really small towns, unloading many times in sketchy places (in the middle of the road), ecc.
Loading and unloading the cars was a major part of this job, in fact many times at the end of the day on my tachometer I had 8 hours of working and only 5 hours of driving.

So here is my first truck at my first trucking job, an Iveco Eurotech 400HP car transporter. With almost 1.500.000km it was one of the oldest trucks of the company still running. The thing was RAW. The only part that was still in great on condition was the engine: really powerful and it never used even single a drop of oil or water.
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After a couple of months the poor Eurotech started having several transmission issues but it was so old it wasn't worth fixing anymore, so my boss decided just to keep it running until it dies. And so it did, one morning at 7am the transmission blew on a mountain in a 2 lane tunnel. Spent the rest of the day in an empty parking at the top of the mountain waiting for a new truck.
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My new home for the week. I got an Iveco Stralis 450HP, it was far from new but far more comfortable compared to the Eurotech. The red interior was really nice.
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A crapload of used rental Smarts. Most of them had the battery dead, it was really fun to load them. :|
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Do you even overhang bro?
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Getting in the center of Milan with a 21 meters long & 4.20meters high truck... Did this way too many times. Driving through Milan ALWAYS scared the crap out of me.
Planning ahead and checking the roads with Google Street View before gettting in there was always the key.
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More vans.
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In order to fit in the length/ height limit and unload order, many times the load unsettled a bit the driveability of the truck. No weight on the front axle in this case, one more good reason to not rush.
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After almost 1 year of transporting cars, I got an interesting offer with shipping containers and decided to give it a try, once again at the biggest company in its sector. The pay was a bit lower but the job was way easier: no responsibility for loading/unloading, many hours of driving only, and most of the time I loaded in a single place and unloaded in a single place, no multiple pickups/ drops. The only hard part of this job were the endless waiting hours at the ports or at the customers.
I jumped from one of the hardest to one of the chillest trucking jobs, two completely different worlds. :shock:

Once again with an Iveco Stralis... These things here are everywhere because they're the cheapest to maintain, but man oh man do they lack reliability.
This was a "normal medium" cab. Coming from a small car transporter this thing felt huge to me.
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Just a beginner with a semi in a really small place. No I didn't get stuck, yes I almost snapped my air cables. :lol:
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Intermodal transport looks pretty interesting: an intermodal curtain trailer loaded on a flatbed.
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Genova port.
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Of course many times I wasn't able to stop at a truckstop, but cooking inside the cab was never an option for me. The food in italian truckstops is either junk or overly expensive.
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After almost 5 months, in the winter of 2017 the awesome Stralis one night decided to fry the main ECU leaving me with the truck completely dead, with no heat at -4°C for the whole night. My working contract was expiring and I got an offer to work as a mechanic restoring pre-war classic cars in my town, I couldn't reject the offer.
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Even if I had some really bad experiences, after 2 years being off the road I start to miss a lot driving all day long, but right now I'm living the dream rebuilding old engines and re-designing old mechanical parts. Racing cars have always been my biggest passion and this job I'm doing at the moment is the closest thing to it. :)

I just want to say a big thank you to SCS for still working hard on ATS & ETS2 and still giving me a driving addiction & countless hours of entertainment. :D
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John
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Joined: 20 Dec 2012 14:27
Location: Bournemouth, UK
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Re: Marius' short IRL adventure

#2 Post by John » 01 May 2020 15:26

Great story Marius!
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