Louisville Switching Blog

Winter is swiftly approaching and with the recent blizzards in West Virginia, you should take inventory to see if your operation is ready for the cold winter months and possible blizzards. Yard trucks are the best tool for moving trailers at your facility, but how well do they operate in the snow?

How can you forget the scene in  The Wizard of Oz when Toto uncovers the identity of the "Great and Powerful Oz?" He was just a man behind a curtain pulling levers and altering his voice to scare people into submission. He promised rewards for completed tasks, but really didn't deliver on his promises. 

Here at Louisville Switching, we are pulling back the curtain. When you work with a company you will always get the pitch from the sales people that sounds too good to be true. And that is because it usually is too good to be true. But with Louisville Switching, we couldn't be more transparent about our people and our commitments. It is the real value of our company.

Last week we had two guys from our inbound marketing company, The Content Squad, come and give an annual overview of why inbound marketing is so powerful. As opposed to traditional marketing, inbound marketing doesn't interrupt your football game, it doesn't over-promise or exaggerate. Inbound marketing pulls the curtain back and shows you the real value of a company or organization. Our real value is simple; it's our people and our product. We can't share that enough! For us it is so basic. We have the best people and the best product. We don't want to advertise with gimmicks or exaggerations. We don't need to. If you have spent any time with our people you know what we are about, and that is serving you like we would serve ourselves. 

The other thing we offer is the best yard truck in the business, the Ottawa Truck. We recently visited one of our clients who leases several yard switchers from us. Their corporate office had recently decided to experiment with a slightly less expensive (vastly less quality) competitor's brand. Chris Troutt asked the driver what he thought about it and he said, "I'd rather have an old Ottawa than a new yard truck from any other brand." The great thing about it is the driver didn't know who Chris was. Chris wan't even wearing a company logo. That is exactly how we feel about Ottawa too. 

So you can always expect Louisville Switching to be up front and honest. We pull the curtain back and are proud of our people and product. Thank you for the privilege of serving you!

With all the new diagnostic capabilities, we can diagnose your yard switcher in record time. Simply connecting our laptop loaded with Ottawa and Cummins technology, we can determine very quickly what is wrong and make the repair. Occasionally there will be error codes that will flash in your cab but they are easily forgotten or erased and without that code, there are lengthy processes mechanics have to go through manually to find out what is wrong.

A few weeks ago one of our mechanics, Kory Swenson, took one of our mobile repair vehicles to diagnose and repair an Ottawa Yard Truck for one of our clients. The trailer spotter didn't know what was wrong except that there was power failure. Without the computer diagnostics, it would have been a two hour turnaround to determine and repair the problem. 

Kory hooked up the laptop to the Ottawa Truck and determined quickly that there was a problem with the OEM. There is an Ottawa oil pressure send unit and a Cummins oil pressure sending unit. The diagnostic pinpointed that the fault was a Cummins oil sending unit. Kory said, "I saved hours of not having to read through the Cummins manual, having to go through every step to figure out what the problem was." 

He replaced the part, the symptom went inactive, and the yard truck experienced no power loss. Hours saved are dollars saved for our clients. We are dedicated to saving them time and money. Thank you Kory for a job well done!

So why purchase an Ottawa Terminal Tractor (aka, yard dog, mule, spotter)?