What Are Drop Yards Used For?

I have a couple of carriers very close to where I live. Knight and Schneider.

When I buzzed by the places, they were just Drop Yards. A small office complex next to a large, fenced in area with a few trucks and trailers inside, along with a few passenger cars that appeared to be in there for long term parking.

What are these used for?

We use a few drop yards around town when we leave the terminal with sets of doubles or triples. This can be a yard owned by, say, one of our clients, where they have the space and just let us us it for that purpose. We leave the terminal with doubles or triples, drive to a drop yard near our route, drop one or two trailers there, make our deliveries till the first trailer is empty, go back to that yard, drop the empty trailer, pick up the full trailer, complete our deliveries, do any pick-ups that are assigned, go back to the drop yard, pick up the empty trailer, go back to the terminal. It's quicker than going back and forth to the terminal.

-mountain girl

We use a few drop yards around town when we leave the terminal with sets of doubles or triples. This can be a yard owned by, say, one of our clients, where they have the space and just let us us it for that purpose. We leave the terminal with doubles or triples, drive to a drop yard near our route, drop one or two trailers there, make our deliveries till the first trailer is empty, go back to that yard, drop the empty trailer, pick up the full trailer, complete our deliveries, do any pick-ups that are assigned, go back to the drop yard, pick up the empty trailer, go back to the terminal. It's quicker than going back and forth to the terminal.

-mountain girl

Ah .... and that makes complete sense why they call it a "drop" yard...

Thanks, MG :)

Sure, no problem!

-mountain girl

I live in Portland OR Prime has a drop yard in Wilsonville, I can drop my trailer there and bobtail home if I take home time.

Here's a use for drop yards that I frequently run into in my flat-bed work. Down in Texas, and southern Arizona, and Southern California I often will both deliver and pick up loaded trailers. These drop yards are used for sending freight into and receiving freight out of Mexico. For example, just outside of San Diego there is a drop yard that I frequently take extruded aluminum pieces to that are used in the manufacture of semi trailers. They go to a Hyundai plant in Mexico. Last time I was there I dropped my loaded trailer for one of my Mexican Amigos to come pick up and take it on the last leg of it's journey. There are too many risks in sending an American Big Rig south of the border. Then I picked up a stack of three new flat-bed trailers from that same plant in Mexico and delivered them to their American destination. Most of the Mexican trucking companies don't run loads in the states because they are driving our old rejected trucks that would never make it past one of our inspection points or weigh stations without being put out of service.

Down in South Texas, in Laredo, you will find literally thousands of drop yards and trucking terminals of every size and flavor. There is millions of dollars worth of freight that goes through that town on any given day. A lot of Mexican run freight handling companies are concentrated in that area, and probably just as many American owned companies are there also. Just about any carrier you could go to work for will have some kind of a yard available to them in that town.

Old School I know the trucks you speak of and yes they can be in pretty bad shape down on the borders. Then again I have also seen some that would make some of our owner ops look like they were driving turds. Some of the works trucks could have been in shows.

Want to know why the Cross Border Trucking Program has been such a fail? As one Mexican gentleman told me "We don't want to drive across the border no more than you all,(meaning us American drivers) want to drive down in Mexico." He told me he gets paid the same no matter where he drivers and he has got plenty of freight in Mexico. Of course we say thing something he said but we also can add in that we want nothing to do with the Dumb A$$ Cartels... Oh I mean drug Cartels down there.