Midwest Truck Driving School - CDL Training

08/04/2026

FedEx flew its first night on April 17, 1973. Fourteen small jets. 186 packages. 25 cities.

Plenty of people thought overnight shipping was a waste of money. The company did not turn a profit until the summer of 1975.

Now we use the name as a verb.

That change in what customers expect is why trucks carry most freight instead of trains. A train hauls more for less money. A train also stops along the way and takes weeks to cross the country.

Factories stopped stockpiling parts. They order what they need for this week.

Speed won.

Speed means shorter runs. Shorter runs mean more trucks based near wherever the freight lands.

And a CDL opens a list of jobs, not one job:

- Food service delivery
- Fuel
- Dump trucks
- Ready-mix concrete
- LTL city routes (smaller loads, lots of stops)
- Store deliveries for one retailer

Some of those have you home by dinner. Some pay more and ask more of you.

Call and ask which ones are hiring around here. 906-789-6311

08/03/2026

Congratulations to Joseph on passing his CDL! 🎉 Your dreams are becoming a reality. Safe travels home, and best of luck on the road ahead!

08/02/2026

The convoy idea in this clip already has a real version running.

In May, McLane and Aurora started running driverless freight between Dallas and Houston. The truck handles about 240 miles of highway. Then it pulls into a terminal, and a McLane driver takes the load the rest of the way to restaurants and stores.

Highway leg by machine. Last leg by a person.

That handoff is where the work might be going. Backing into a tight dock behind a building. Getting into a customer site when the lot is full. Talking to the guy on the receiving end.

That part still takes a driver.

And look at where those drivers live. Near the terminal. Home at night.

If you are weighing a CDL right now, ask any recruiter one question: how much of your freight runs local or regional?

That answer tells you more about your next five years than the pay-per-mile number does.

Questions about where the local work is around here, call us. 906-789-6311

07/31/2026

Aurora runs the biggest driverless truck operation in the country. They started hauling commercial freight without a driver in Texas in May 2025. By January 2026 they had passed 250,000 driverless miles. They expect more than 200 driverless trucks running by the end of this year.

The American Trucking Associations counted about 3.58 million employed truck drivers in 2024.

200 trucks vs 3.58 million drivers.

Weather is still a big obstacle. Aurora said bad weather limited its Texas driverless operations around 40 percent of the time in 2025.

That's in Texas. Now picture US-2 in February..

So when the next headline comes across your feed, ask three things:

1. Was there a person in the seat?
2. Was it a fixed route between two terminals?
3. Who took it the last mile?

The technology is real and it is growing. It also covers a sliver of the freight moving in this country, in the warmest part of it, on routes somebody mapped ahead of time.

Do your own homework on this. That includes anything we tell you. We have a stake in your answer and you should weigh that.

If you want to talk it through with somebody who has been in the industry twenty years, call us. If it is not a fit for you, we will say so. 906-789-6311

Episode 24 of Built in the Midwest is out now.

07/30/2026

Great opportunity for some of our graduates from the Marquette area!

07/29/2026

Congratulations to Jon on passing his CDL! 🎉🚛
Your hard work and dedication paid off. Wishing you safe travels and all the best on the road. Congratulations—you earned it!

07/29/2026

Congratulations to Joe on passing his CDL! 🎉 You're unstoppable, my friend! Wishing you nothing but success and safe travels on the road. 🚛

07/29/2026

07/28/2026

Most jobs hand you the same day on repeat. You already know what Thursday looks like. Same door, same eight hours, same drive home in the dark.

Driving OTR isn't like that.

Penny hauled pharmaceuticals that had to stay cold the whole run. She hauled food. She hauled high-security freight that came with rules about where she could stop and what time she had to be there. Different customer, different rig setup, different set of things to think about.

Same license for all of it.

That's the part people miss when they picture trucking. They see one truck and think it's one job. It's really more like a door that opens onto a bunch of them, and you get to keep picking as you go.

Get tired of one kind of freight and you move to another. Want to be home every night, there's work that does that too. Nothing about the first job you take has to be the last one.

Penny drove for years and now she teaches here. That was a choice she got to make, and the license is what made it hers to make.