The morning started off rather roughly when I tried to back the truck out of the bobtail parking, only to find myself hung up on some ice. After several attempts and a few curses at the steering wheel, one of the snow plow drivers helped me out and extricated the tractor from that mess. I found the loaded trailer, updated my paperwork, then hit the road.
Conditions in Indiana were significantly worse than I expected. The snow had slowed to mere flurries by the time I hit the road, but 15 mph winds were enough to blow things everywhere. As such, the left lane was quite heavily covered in snow and ice while the right was jammed with vehicles doing about 25 in a 70. It was quite hard to even tell where one lane ended and the other lane began but I muddled through to Eaton, OH, where I tried to make a quick stop for breakfast.
The quick stop turned out to be not so quick: what should have taken only twenty minutes ended up taking most of an hour. The off-ramp was temporarily blocked due to an accident. The entrance to the truck stop was alsoblocked by a truck caught on a snow drift. Those two incidents combined to cost me at least a half hour. Once I got into the truck stop I scaled out quickly (and, thankfully, was legal weight on the first try), grabbed some breakfast, then tried to hit the road again. This time the exit was blocked by the line of trucks trying to get around, a situation that took nearly ten minutes to remedy itself. Only then could I get back on the highway.
From there, conditions improved dramatically, particularly once I got on US 35 east of Dayton, OH. I averaged nearly 55 on that leg of the trip and quickly made it to the West Virginia turnpike. Twenty miles down the turnpike, though, the low coolant warning came on and I barely made it onto the "shoulder" - little more than a drainage ditch - before the engine shut off. I took a moment to regain my composure, put out my warning triangles, then opened the hood... only to discover nothing useful at all. That's right: aside from the coolant reservoir being far below the "min" line there was no indivation at all as to where the problem was.
I called breakdown and played the waiting game. They said that, due to the weather, they were severely backed up and that it would probably be an hour before they could even call for a tow truck. As always, they said that they'd call me as soon as they had anything useful to say. Rather than getting a call, though, I was awakened from my nap by a knock on the truck door about an hour and twenty minutes later by someone who claimed to be with the towing company that the breakdown department called. The person got increasingly angry as I insisted that I wanted to call to verify that they were, in fact, the right company. Upon getting confirmation of that, the tow guy made a remark about never doubting a wrecker driver and continued to talk with extreme condescension toward me throughout the effort.
Rather than towing my truck, though, the company just put two gallons of water into the cooling system and told me to drive it to the next exit about two miles away. I was stunned, to say the least; we were paying them to tow the truck after all. The rig made it there without incident, to my pleasant surprise, at which point I unhooked the trailer and bobtailed to the repair facility. The place wasn't in Charleston as I'd been told though; it was in a remote small town about twenty miles from there. I was rather worried as the place did not look like the sort of facility we would normally use. I called breakdown to verify that I was in the right place and shouldn't be afraid of banjo music, just in case.
To keep this already long post from getting even longer: several hours of testing later, including idling the truck at 1,800 RPM for 30 minutes, revealed nothing. The mechanics blamed me for not checking to make sure there was enough coolant in the thing in the first place and sent me on my way. All told I lost a good four hours due to the incident and had to rely on yet another set of convenient rounding errors to keep me from logging a violation.
I'm now going to be almost half a day late on a service critical load and, since the shop couldn't actually find a problem, there's a chance that they'll blame me for failing to deliver it on time. Granted, with the weather being such a wild card, there's a pretty good chance I wouldn't have made it anyway, but there was still that glimmer of hope that I'd have been successful. Oh well, nothing can be done about it now.
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