[instarx]

I grew up in a trucking family and although there may be regional terminology differences, "dead heading" (not dead legging) is traveling anywhere without a paying load. You can have a trailer attached. What you saw is called a bob-tailing, as mwpiper pointed out. The cab itself is called a bob-tail when it is driven without a trailer. It can also be a verb such as "Bob-tail over to XYZ Company and pick up our trailer." or "I'm going to drop my trailer here and bob-tail home for Thanksgiving."

I agree with mwpiper 100%, the solution for using trucks efficiently is to keep them local or even regional. Trains offer much more efficent transportation for products over long distances.

I have always thought that a bunch of "truck-trains" would make sense. Trucks with tractors would be driven onto a train, the drivers would retire to the lounge/sleeping car to travel in comfort to a hub near their final destination. The trucks would then be driven off the train and head for the factory docks.

This would combine the best of both worlds of trucks and trains. It makes no sense to drive a truck and trailer 3,000 miles cross-country to deliver a single trailer of whatever. The thing that keeps so many trucks on the road doing just that is that it employs a lot of people. However, switching over to containerized freight using trains would cause a lot of unemployment. The truck-train would keep truck owner/operators employed, make life easier for them, reduce their costs, and save fuel/energy. I bet a lot of truckers would like to pay $1,000 to get cross-country on a train than $2,000 in diesel fuel AND do all that driving.