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While truck drivers put their skills to the test behind the wheel at the ATA National Truck Driving Championships, commercial vehicle inspectors from the United States, Canada and Mexico will be testing their ability to spot safety defects on big rigs and commercial buses.

More than 350 of the nation’s best truck drivers will converge on Minneapolis this week to compete in the ATA National Truck Driving Championships.

A pension fund for retirees of defunct Fruehauf Trailer Corp. has purchased the assets of bankrupt Dorsey Trailers and is gearing up to resume production.

Loading packages may not seem like a very sophisticated job. For Al Bedran, though, it’s like a work of art.

With a softening economy reducing freight volume and spiraling fuel costs boosting the cost of service, 2000 was not expected to be a good year for motor carriers. And indeed, for most, it wasn’t.

Twenty years ago, Jake Wood was a young accountant working for Arthur Andersen in Omaha when he got the assignment of working with four new trucking clients.

The year 2000 will be remembered as the year in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Fuel costs soared, the stock market fell, insurance premiums doubled and tripled for some firms, used truck values plummeted and demand for freight services softened. It was trucking’s equivalent of the perfect storm.

Burlington Motor Carriers confirmed Friday that it has filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code as a result of its inability to restructure long-term debt with equipment lenders.

Is the party over for trucking stocks? After seeing prices appreciate as much as 64% over the past year, trucking equity analyst James J. Valentine of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter downgraded his four truckload stock picks from “outperform” to “neutral” on May 7 and said he doesn’t expect trucking stocks to rebound until mid-2002.

With trailer sales falling off as much as 36% this year, one would expect trailer manufacturers to be suffering. So far, though, the casualties appear to have been relatively light.