Question:
Hey Shuffler, do Werner western regional drivers make any eastbound trips on a regular basis, or do they mainly just run up and down I-5?
By eastbound, I'm talking about Denver, Albq, Billings, SLC, etc. I know that some of the companies that run western 11 do the vast majority of their running up and down the 5, and I imagine that that would get boring pretty quick.

Answer:
It's actually pretty spread-out. Although most of the population lives west of the Rockies, our western drivers handle a lot of freight that's passed to other drivers or dropped along the way as it's moved from region to region..
example: I load in south Los Angeles and run it to Wyoming, where I swap loads with a driver who'll take it the rest of the way. I take his/her load to Sacramento... lots of that kind of thing. Werner has a pretty sophiscated "drop and swap" system where long-disance loads are passed between drivers working their specific region.
Probably about 1/3 of my driving is in the I-5 corridor. The rest is running between Salt Lake, Phoenix, Denver, Vegas and lots of smaller popultion centers inbetween. I just spent about 10 days running lots of Californie/Oregon I-5 stuff. But a few weeks earlier, I didn't see I-5 for 15 or 20 days.
Our "eleven Western' region stops at the western borders of Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, and most of our time is spent west of those state lines. I sometimes cross out of the region to North Platte NE, Amarillo, El Paso and even Laredo TX. But leaving the region like this is usually rare for our western region solo drivers.