and a home away from home for heavy haulers.

Offering everything from automated showers [shower #5 is now ready]

to a treasure trove of chrome,

to your very own electrified parking space,

massive scales,

inspections on the fly,

and revolutionary fuel

that'll get you on the road again.

Well, the truckers tell me they do get better gas mileage.

Buckle up. It's time to get trucking.

Now: Truck Stops, on Modern Marvels.

Trucks ...

each year in the United States, they travel over 1.5 trillion() miles,

hauling more than 11 billion tons of freight.

That's more than 9 trillion dollars worth of cargo.

Any product that you buy in a store, it got to that location by a truck.

What I always go by is

Without trucks, America stops.

Just as trucks keep America moving,

an army of more than 3 million men and women keep the trucks rolling.

These weary road warriors spend weeks hooked up in a cab.

But they have an oasis on the road,

the truck stop.

We have some place to park, a place to eat,

do laundry, take shower, uh...

There are some things 'side sitting here holding a steering wheel.

When the normal person goes home from their day of work,

they like to sit on their easy chair and relax.

Well, that's what truck stops offer the drivers.

Drivers can really kick up their feet at the Iowa 80 trucks stop in Walcott, IA.

Built as the world's largest truck stop,

It plays host to more than 5,000 truckers everyday.

Iowa 80 sprawls across 225 acres,

4 times the area covered by the average truck stop.

That's two-and-a-half times the size of Disney Land.

There are now parking spaces here for 800 rigs.

and the main building spends more than 70,000 square feet.

The fuel center alone is double the size of most truck stops.

It can dispense diesel to 15 big rigs at once around the clock.

Now it's time to fuel a truck

Do it the same way you do, when you gash(?) your card up.

We enter the truck number,

the mileage,

and the driver ID.

This authorizes the prompt, so that they know who's using it.

Then you simply turn on the prompt, open up your tank,

and put your nozzle in.

But we as truckers have one more thing we can do. Let me show you the trick.

Most trucks have 2 fuel tanks.

So when it comes time to fuel the other side,

we come over and use another pump.

These dual dispensers can fuel both tanks simultaneously.

One dispenser is a master unit.

That controls the fueling and records the sale.

The fuel flows from the underground tank to a metering system in the master dispenser

and then onto both nozzles.

A pipe from the master unit carries the fuel underground to the other dispenser,

called the satellite unit.

Took 167 gallons,

about $440 worth.

Fuel is expensive, but without fuel these trucks are not going to move.

This lasts me probably 1,200 miles. So I probably won't need a fuel

for probably another 24 to 36 hours.

Before dual sided pumps became an industry standard in the late 1980s,

fueling the passenger side tank was anything but a gas.

We had to take the hose and throw it underneath the truck.

It'd sometimes get full of dirt, so we'd have to clean the dirt out.

Now that we have 2 pumps.

it goes so much faster and so much cleaner too.

After drivers fill up at Iowa 80,

they could head over to the Truckomat.

It's just a spot for big rigs that need big bathes.

[--Truck & trailer wash? --Truck & trailer. --All right]

The truck wash uses a combination of manpower and machine power.

We hand scrub the rigs because it's the more traditional way of doing it

but the size of the trailer has to be scrubbed

and if we did by hand it would take 20 minutes probably.

So we fabricated this machine to do that for us.

The brush comes out with

air power and spins on both sides of the trailers.

As the machine's going, we don't have to do anything. We're just doing our job

and the machine will do its job. And

that's it.

Washers even clean under the hood.

Wielding a high-pressure wand,

it sprays more than 1,500 pounds per square inch of water.

That's 50 times stronger than the average garden hose.

It's 180 degree water; It takes off all the grime,

and dissolves the oil and whatnot that collects on the engine.

And I'll often find oil leaks and other fluid leaks they might have.

After less than15 minutes of scrubbing leaves the rig squeaky clean,

the truck driver finds a parking spot to let it air dry.

Iowa 80 has come a long way since it opened in 1964.

Bill Moon, original manager for Standard Oil,

selected the site for his company.

It was strategically located along the emerging Interstate 80.

I-80 was stretched from San Francisco almost 3,000 miles east across the country

to become one of America's first interstate routes,

a critical artery spanning all the way to New York City.

When Iowa 80 opened however,

traffic was light and so was the demand for truck stops.

When we started out, we had maybe 2 gas pumps and about 3 diesel pumps,

and we had a small store.

And parking for maybe 8 or 10 trucks. And that was it.

In 1984, Moon purchased the truck stop from the oil company.

Under his management, the site flourished. and innovated.

You know, in here is one of the best things I've ever found in a truck stop.

It's a trucker store.

This 30,000-square-foot showroom is the trucking industry's Bloomingdale's.

stocked with chrome,

stainless steel and more lights than the biggest strip.

As we do our yards, as we fix our houses, fix our house up,

truck drivers feel that way about their trucks. They're in them all year round,

and they want to make 'em look nice

The showroom features a wall 20 feet tall and 40 feet wide.

displaying 500 illuminated LED lights.

Although safety regulations dictate

that every tractor trailer be equipped with at least 22 lights,

many truckers like to light up their rigs like Christmas trees.

And if they're shopping for a different kind of dazzle,

3 decked-out semis flaunt the truckers' delight.

Chrome, the protective shiny metal that makes rigs glisten in the sun.

We've added a lot of chrome accessories to these show trucks.

They have full fenders to a step, 6 inch stacks.

And of course, the custom front bumper.

Chrome is slang for chromium,

a highly reflective blue-white metal resistant to tarnish and corrosion

It's added to other metals like aluminum to form a protective and attractive covering

through a process called electroplating.

First, the aluminum part is wired to the negative pole of a battery,

and chromium to the positive pole.

Next, both metals are immersed in a solution of chromic and sulphuric acid

to permit the flow of electricity

Since the aluminum is negatively charged,

it attracts the positively charged Chromium.

Automakers in the 1950s

began using chrome to produce cars with a flashy appeal.

Soaring tail fins and grinning wide mouth grills lined the highways,

and chrome became a household word.

Today chrome has taken a back seat in passenger car design,

but modern big rigs carry on its glistening legacy.

After dishing out their dough on a sparkling chrome accessory,

drivers can retire to the truckers' area.

It's home to 23 private shower rooms

a driver's den, a 60-seat, Dolby Surround Sound movie theater,

and a barbershop.

There's even a dentist.

If there is such a thing called an emergency room of dental care,

this would be it.

I'm usually the truck driver's best friend,

because I am taking them out of pain.

Although perks like a dentist and a barber

may entice a driver to pull into this mega pit stop,

a home-cooked meal can really draw a crowd.

The restaurant's the heartbeat of the truck stop.

Drivers like comfort food, and they like large portions,

and they want to feel like they're getting a lot for their money.

The Iowa 80 kitchen restaurant serves more than a million cups of coffee,

two million eggs,

and 90 tons of, meat each year.

When you can find a truck stop that's got homemade food, boy, you live for that.

I'm going to live high on the hog today.

This type of road side pit stop dates back to the 1920s.

As cars and trucks began dominating America's roads,

the original mom and pop truck stops sprouted up.

They catered to truck drivers by providing just the basics--

food, fuel and a mattress.

They'd have bunk rooms,

basically a spare room in the back of the station

where people would be pretty crammed in.