It’s a long way from hauling hogs on a milk run from Quad Cities to Chicago to becoming one of the Nation’s pre-eminent high and heavy freight specialists, but in the 69 years since Sidney Tennant acquired his first truck and trailer that is exactly what Tennant Truck Lines (TTL) has achieved. Headquartered in Orion, Ill., and with fully staffed terminals in Moline, Ill., Augusta, Ga., and Baltimore, Md., along with drop yards in Grand Island, Neb., and Valley City N.D., Tennant Truck Lines (TTL), today, provides service to all of the 48 contiguous states for a customer base located predominately in the Midwest and Southeast.
“I wish I could tell you that it was all planned out,” says Tennant Truck Line President—and Sidney Tennant’s grandson—Aaron Tennant. “It wasn’t: Back in the 1950s, my grandfather opened a machinery dealership and, in order to better serve his customer base, built a custom designed trailer in order to deliver to customers.”
Sidney Tennant was clearly onto something; today, the TTL Fleet numbers in excess of 250 company-owned tractors along owner-operators on permanent lease. A wide variety of both specialist and conventional dry van trailers carry freight for a broad customer base including near neighbor Deere.
Moving high and heavy freight is a specialist subset of the trucking business, and while some of the issues that beset mainstream trucking are problems that TTL confronts every day, Aaron Tennant also has a secondary list of challenges unique to his segment.
One common issue at present is driver availability and retention. “I don’t ever remember it being this bad,” Tennant says. “A few years ago, our driver turnover was in the low 30 percentile. It has increased a lot, but we are not losing drivers to other trucking fleets but to other industries.”
For Tennant Truck Lines, this is a doubly difficult issue. The specialist nature of its business demands drivers familiar with the task. That precludes employing student drivers. “The improvement in the economy is equally a blessing and a curse,” Tennant says. “I could not be happier that our customer base is expanding and profiting from a resurgent market. I’m not so happy is when our drivers go to work for our customers.”
Tennant points out—reasonably enough—that the opportunity to work a fixed schedule and to be home each night is an appealing one. Unfortunately, and although TTL’s depot network allows for some degree of drop and hook operation, the nature of the company’s operation means little by way of predictability. “We do everything we can to get our drivers home as often as possible,” Tennant says. “But the nature of this work—the need for permits, for movement schedules and the simple issue that our customers have their customers across the country means that we cannot offer the same sort of job predictability as the dry van fleets.
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