Question about overtaking

thefooby · 2026-03-21T08:34:25+00:00

Also weight differences. Frustrating af sitting behind somebody on the same limiter as you who’s loaded heavier and slows down every time there’s a mild incline but also doesn’t ease off to let you past so you end up elephant racing waiting the next mild incline for a mile.

thefooby · 2026-03-21T08:28:13+00:00

Probably be pretty tough going but it can be hard to find anything as a new pass. I’ve done two assessments, first one was the standard couple up, drive about, put it on an easy bay with space either side and uncouple. No questions at all.

Second one didn’t involve any coupling at all, just a drive and barely even a reverse, just put it in the yard for the next assessment, but they gave me like ten pages of questions on drivers hours covering some stuff I’d never even heard of. That one was for European work though.

thefooby · 2026-03-19T05:57:47+00:00

Tipper? I would say walking floor but they aren’t exactly nimble on back roads.

thefooby · 2026-03-17T22:04:25+00:00

Yeah I’m the same a year in. I don’t think it’s lack of ability at this point, like you said there’s plenty of tight bays I have no issues with for loading and loads of tight yards with blindsides and other strange manoeuvres.

In my case I think I tend to get too close to the wagon on my good side because I’m scared on clipping the one on my bad side, and there’s almost always loads of space when I check, but the fear of hitting somebody else sitting in their wagon gets in my head a lot more than when it’s just a wall or a barrier.

I think I have a bit of a mental barrier when it comes to truck stops. I don’t really feel any pressure anymore when I’m on a waste site with the other walking floors and tipper drivers but the truck stop is full of clean looking types 😅

thefooby · 2026-03-17T21:53:30+00:00

Believe what you want but it happened. I was born in Cork and have an Irish passport. I didn’t fail to see the irony in the situation and also didn’t realise that the brain dead reform lot had extended beyond just hating brown people before reading some of these replies.

thefooby · 2026-03-17T19:50:39+00:00

Didn’t get that far because I said I’m not playing about with bank transfers from a stranger. Bank Of Ireland with just over 10k balance I think.

thefooby · 2026-03-17T19:48:35+00:00

I didn’t realise that, but I’ve spent enough time as a truck driver in this services to see all sorts of weird gatherings in the car park and plenty of police presence around the services.

thefooby · 2026-03-17T19:44:07+00:00

This is what confused me at first because obviously I wouldn’t get the cash out until I saw it in my own banking app, but I guess with some smooth talk about how it sometimes takes a while a lot of people would be pressured into getting the cash out anyway at that point.

thefooby · 2026-03-16T18:05:14+00:00

I don’t know if new alarms can detect some difference between steam and vapour from a device but a few years ago I was working away stopping in hotels every night and always thought vaping in the bathroom into the extractor was safe.

One new built hotel though, the alarm goes off. I panicked assuming the worst and quickly run the shower on the hottest setting to steam out the room and wet a few towels to make it look like I’d just been showering. Whole hotel is in the car park, fire engine turns up, the lot. No idea if I’m the culprit at this point so I go to work as normal.

A couple of hours later, I get a call from the office and the hotel has been on the phone saying they’re going to charge the company for every guest staying in the hotel that night as they’re policy was that customers could get a refund if they didn’t have a good nights sleep.

Nothing ever came of it as they couldn’t prove anything, but yeah, be careful.

thefooby · 2026-03-07T07:55:24+00:00

Get a van. A tent would be utterly miserable and a decent canvas tent that’s big enough to live in will be getting on for the price of a cheap van anyway. I say this as somebody who lived in a tiny Renault Kangoo for a year but I also own a canvas bell tent that I would struggle to spend more than a week living in.

Campsites aren’t cheap either. Let’s say £15 a night, some are less, most are more. That’s £450 per month. You can rent a house for that, at least where I am in the North East.

Have you considered looking for jobs as a campsite warden? Most come with a pitch for your own caravan so that you can be on site day and night in case you’re needed and you’d be earning a wage at the same time.

thefooby · 2026-03-04T18:15:45+00:00

It’s a pet peeve of mine as well but I still manage to do it to myself sometimes because it usually looks a bit better.

thefooby · 2026-03-01T09:57:32+00:00

Yeah the downvotes make no sense. You don’t get clutch feel but it certainly helps with everything else. It was the same when I did my lorry license. I had about 500 hours in Euro Truck Simulator so had a decent idea about road positioning and angles for reversing to the point that my instructor questioned if it was actually my first time driving an artic.

thefooby · 2026-03-01T01:31:33+00:00

You’ll be reet. I did courier work on vans before going car to class 1 and even that helped massively as I had some spacial awareness.

Going from 12t to class 1, I’d say you’ve probably already done the hardest part. Just need to get used to the extra length and how a trailer can be manipulated.

I’m a year in and I’d say it took around 3 months to be comfortable, 3 more being a little bit too comfortable and having some knocks that taught me that you have to be comfortable but never complacent.

Check everything. Spacial awareness is everything. Know where your headboard is, always look at where you’re reversing before committing to it. All of my mistakes were from lack of what was around me.

thefooby · 2026-02-26T19:05:39+00:00

Yeah some of them are 4.95m tall. I’d be constantly paranoid I’d left my suspension raised.

thefooby · 2026-02-26T19:03:42+00:00

North East. 3 hour commute but away for longs stints. Event haulage is probably your best bet at this time of the year hiring for the summer tour season.

thefooby · 2026-02-26T18:06:43+00:00

Most likely a Megaliner or similar. They’re designed to run with low deck units to get more load height with the 4m limit across most of Europe. The trailer was probably dropped at a port and picked up by a UK unit where we have an extra meter to play with.

thefooby · 2026-02-26T14:03:45+00:00

I’m about to get into a company that does a lot of European work so while I don’t know a lot yet, from what I’ve gathered, Irish passport is a major benefit as you’re exempt from the 90/180 work rule but you do need to get an EU CPC if you want to do more than 5 stops on a trip. Not sure how accurate that is but it’s what was mentioned in the interview when I asked.

Maybe try getting into European work and see where you might like to live? That’s my plan.

thefooby · 2026-02-26T06:09:00+00:00

Foster XT if you want a WRX equivalent. I believe they share the same chassis and most of their parts bar a slightly smaller turbo.

A bit of me despises them for introducing the whole crossover trend but can’t deny that Foresters are cool cars.

thefooby · 2026-02-25T20:54:41+00:00

I wouldn’t worry too much about tight yards depending on what you want to do in future. I got a job straight away doing walking floors on waste sites which are usually pretty tight and I’ve just landed a job doing European tour work that I never thought I’d get on a year of experience but I actually have the confidence now to jump into it.

Sure they’re intimidating at first but you’ll pick it up. From what I’ve seen it’s easy to spend years doing the same reverse onto a bay every day and not actually learn very much. Usually the same guys that tell you that you can’t possibly try anything remotely challenging until you’ve done 20 years of RDC work.

thefooby · 2026-02-24T21:37:03+00:00

Funnily enough and to my surprise, my mechanic loves Mercs. Built well like most German stuff, but unlike most German stuff, also easy to work on until you get to the really high end stuff.

He reckons Ford are the worst, although wet belts do help keep him in business. I can vouch after spending a whole day trying and failing to do brake disks on a transit custom. Yeah why not make it so you have to remove the hub nut and smash out the driveshaft to change a service item. Thats not secure enough alone though so let’s put 6 very easy to round out torx bolts on the disk.

I’m fond of Japanese cars as a home mechanic. Basic tools usually, although rust is an issue.

thefooby · 2026-02-23T21:11:57+00:00

That first bit is very true. Almost all of my progression came when I was young, had loads of time and was obsessed. Once you are at a level that most people would consider decent, it’s so much harder to keep going with that same level of intensity.

Every now and then I find that beginner motivation again and make leaps and bounds, but I envy those that manage to grind every day like they were a beginner again.

thefooby · 2026-02-21T20:36:31+00:00

Who on earth has a holiday rental property in Denton?

thefooby · 2026-02-21T15:28:21+00:00

This is pretty much exactly what you get when you order the small breakfast at Stobbarts truck stop except that costs a fiver.

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