I always remember a story told by my Uncle Eddie, who drove tractor - trailer on the East Coast for 40 years. When I was just a newbie at Conway Western I was ' trading lies ' on his back porch in Scranton, PA., and complaining about how gutless my assigned line tractor was on the uphill side of Grapevine. His reply : " It don't matter how fast you go up the hill, Georgie. What matters is how fast you go down the hill. You only get one chance to go down too fast."
Later on, when I was a driver / trainer at Conway, I would coach the newbies in the fine art of dropping down Grapevine Canyon with the pedal brakes only. ( Conway was too cheap to put Jake Brakes on their tractors; hell they didn't even use S - Cam brakes on the axles until the old Wedge Brakes were outlawed. ) If we made it to the Runaway Ramp and could still see the back trailer through the smoke, I considered it a good run !!!