I would have hoped all the Vitran/Pjax bashing would have stopped by now, as a former PJAX driver I am really sick and tired of hearing after 8 years how its all PJAX's fault, yes we had our problems and yes Mark Kosevec was not the person for the job, when you consider he was taking a small family run (who trained him) regional trucking company that specialized in next day service anywhere in our coverage area, to a semi nationwide international publicly traded company he was in over his head (for his skill level) he tried to apply the same operating principles to Vitran that we had at PJAX, some worked most did not (you can't service Baltimore next day from St Louis by ground and we were not set up nor switched over to a break bulk type setup soon enough) if you look back to when we REALLY started the downhill slide it was when Vitran bought Milan at the same time as the bottom was falling out of the economy, and the fact that it took so long to "merge" operations, that in my opinion is what doomed us from the start. if you look at any other buyout that was going down in the same time frame you'll see all the ones that are still in business did it differently. You didn't have years after the buyout two different trucks from the "same" company going in to pick up freight at the same customer, or different terminals handling the same city (sometimes same customer) for each company ( Ann Arbor Mi was serviced by Toledo for PJAX and Detroit for vitran (Howell mi was serviced by Detroit for PJAX and Flint for Vitran))
Take Saia for example when they bought out the connection with in 6 months there was no trace of the connection left (except some lettering on equipment) and their buyout was at least 6months after Vitran bought PJAX yet 8 years after the vitran buyout and 5 years after PJAX ceased to exist on paper we were STILL going into customers and getting PJAX freight (or leaving it behind for new drivers that didn't know better) basically the whole buyout was doomed from the start, if it had been done properly then we might still be in business today.