COEs rule the road

After week in Germany, where I saw only one truck with a "bonnet" - that is engine ahead of cab (and it was a Dodge Ram pickup!) -it did feel a little bit like a time warp, when COEs ruled the road in North America.
Here's a sampling of the various makes I saw last week:

 Scania, DAF, Volvo. MAN and Mercedes of all ages, but all COE.

On  arrival home I was pleased to see another Freightliner COE on Canadian soil:

Canam Steel from Quebec has a fleet of FLiners, there were three in Halifax on Wednesday, all with long loads of structural steel.
Longtime users of COEs to get more length, Canam and others have been able to purchase Freightliner COEs, new, as glider kits. As long as they could rebuild on older drive trains, Freightliner would sell new COE gliders to them. This was never publicized very much, but several owners that haul oversize and extra long loads have been buying these gliders and building them up over the past several years. Apparently Freightliner has now got the message and may be putting them into more regular production.The have been building RHD COEs for Australia and New Zealand all along, so the cabs were never really out of production.

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