Minnesota Truck-Weight Education Training

Loaded truck in transit

Date and Location

Not currently scheduled.

About the Training

This training promotes voluntary compliance to reduce damage to public roads and highways from overweight vehicles. Its goal is to teach you how to haul the most legal weight without violating truck-weight laws.

You'll learn about road-weight regulations during various times of the year, including the winter load increase and spring load restrictions. How trucks are configured—with proper axle spacing and tire size—makes a difference.

Instructors will provide professional, easy-to-understand take-home materials to assist you with your own configurations and options. The training is updated to reflect changes in truck-weight legislation.

Who Should Attend

Trucking entities who want to load to the maximum legal weight possible. Scale operators, farm truck owners and operators, aggregate haulers, truck manufacturers who configure truck axles and tires, township and county authorities who influence truck route weights, any company representative who influences the purchase or alteration of new trucks, out-of-state companies who need to understand and comply with Minnesota's legal weight limits, and truck driving students.

Please Note: This is not a “permitting” class for those who haul over-dimensional or overweight equipment that requires an oversize permit from either the state or county agencies. The class does cover the permit requirement for harvest and timber commodities and the 10 percent winter-load-increase (WLI) permit for trucks operating on Interstate highways.

Topics Covered

  • Update of road weight limits and differences between the state and local systems
  • Laws governing gross weights, axle weights, tire weights, road-restriction weights, and seasonally increased (winter and harvest) weights
  • Road damage issues: how overweight trucks cost us all
  • Overweight truck issues go beyond gross and axle weights
  • Classroom exercises to help you identify concerns in your own trucks
  • What’s different in axle spacing? Do I have the right tires for the weight?
  • Issues to consider when purchasing a new truck or altering a current truck
  • Introduction and demonstration of the new Minnesota truck-weight calculator, an online resource to help training attendees determine weights based on vehicle configuration

Course Staff and Instructors

  • Tom J. Nelson, Technical Program Manager and Instructor
  • Paul Robischon, Instructor/Portable Scale Weighing

This course was originally developed by Greg A. Hayes in 2001 to help anyone understand the technical criteria of the truck-weight laws in Minnesota. For questions regarding course content, please contact Tom Nelson, 320-828-1809 or Tom.Nelson51@gmail.com.

Credit

Informational Contact

With questions regarding course content, please contact tkweight@umn.edu.

Sponsors

This program is funded by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) and administered by the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota.