Don’t look for a negotiated rulemaking on hours of service. Prospects for reforming driver hours by general consensus withered when the Transportation Department released a report June 10 that recommended against trying to bring interested parties around the table to work out a new regulation.

The national average price of diesel fuel bounced to $1.068 per gallon, rising nine-tenths of a cent from the previous week’s average of $1.059 and reversing a four-week slide. The increase was driven in large measure by a 5-cents-a-gallon increase in California.

While sales of new Class 8 trucks broke all records in 1998, shorter replacement cycles are putting more of those late-model trucks on the used market. For owner-operators and many fleet managers, what this means is the potential to get a lot more truck than might be possible in the new truck market — and at a bargain price. Put simply, it's turning into a buyer’s market.

This city features a scaled-down Manhattan skyline, a pyramid not quite as large as some of those built by the pharaohs, and other replicas of familiar sights from somewhere else. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Las Vegas was host to something that looked a lot like a major trucking show — only smaller.

A “town meeting” on hours-of-service regulations that featured a top federal regulator had nothing to do with new truck equipment but it was one of the highlights of the International Trucking Show.

Meritor Automotive will fold its transmission business into a joint operation with ZF Friedrichshafen AG, marking the second venture this year for the German manufacturer aimed at segments of the medium- and heavy-duty truck markets in North America.

North American truck manufacturers sold 22,499 Class 8 trucks in May, prompting a leading industry analyst to call 1999 sales “about as good as we have seen since the advent of the diesel age.”

The national average price of diesel fuel bounced to $1.068 per gallon, rising nine-tenths of a cent from the previous week’s average of $1.059 and reversing a four-week slide. The increase was driven in large measure by a 5-cents-a-gallon increase in California.

Three weeks into the division of Conrail between Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads, incompatible computer systems have caused so many problems that United Parcel Service, their biggest intermodal customer, has pulled 50% of its traffic off both railroads and put it back on the highways.

The price of diesel fuel continued its downward trend, hitting a nine-week low of $1.065 a gallon May 31, one-tenth of a cent off the previous week’s national average. Gasoline prices, which had been expected to rise, also dropped by 1.5 cents to $1.151.