Times-News

GOODING - On any given day, D&D Transportation Services has up to 95 semi-tractor trailers on the road nationwide.

Three of those 18-wheel rigs are driven by married couples, a growing trend in the trucking industry.

"We do have married couples that drive together," Tim Young, the company's safety director and recruiter, said Thursday. "Most of them, their kids are raised. They can travel together."

Depending on how many miles they drive, Young said, a married team of drivers can earn up to $70,000 annually.

"That's probably even a little low," he said."For the ones who can make it work, it's a great thing."

The trucking industry, fearing a worsening shortage of long-haul drivers, is launching an ad campaign for recruitment and is particularly interested in older couples.

It works for Jim and Eva Sisler of Helen, Mont., who began traveling the country nearly 10 years ago.

Driving from California to New Jersey in two days, using layovers to visit historic sites in the South or ethnic restaurants in Chicago, the Sislers pack in a lot. Back in Montana, the empty nesters who are in their 50s revel in the simple pleasures of home. It's a nice change from life in an 18-wheel truck.

Home is a place in Big Arm, along sprawling Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana. Paid by the mile, the Sislers together earned more than $100,000 last year as drivers for Watkins & Shepard Trucking Co. and have built a retirement account.

The United States has about 1.3 million drivers of long-haul, heavy trucks, roughly 20,000 fewer than needed, according to American Trucking Associations, an industry group based in Alexandria, Va. A 2005 study the associations commissioned projects a shortage of 111,000 drivers by 2014, a gap attributed partly to retirements and inadequate recruitment, plus increased demand for trucking.

Reaching out to a larger segment of the labor force is critical to the future of an industry long reliant on men working solo, said Ray Kuntz, Watkins & Shepard chief executive and incoming chairman of the associations. The study found drivers cited time away from home and unpredictable schedules for getting home as reasons for quitting more often than money.

Long-distance haulers of general freight averaged $17.62 an hour in February, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, which calls the job outlook favorable.

The trucking associations' national advertising campaign is being rolled out gradually, first in Montana, Minnesota and Oklahoma. Romanticizing the work, one billboard silhouettes trucks on a bridge at sunset and boasts, "my office has a better view than yours." A recruitment Web site, www.gettrucking.com, tells visitors "the road is calling." The campaign includes TV commercials, print advertising and pitches at bus stops. A wrapping for truck trailers makes them into mobile signs with the message that driving a big rig is a great career.

"We are looking for the husband-wife team, folks looking for a second career, people who want to see the country," said Elisabeth Barna, a vice president for American Trucking Associations.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.