Whatever happened to HCT?

High Country Transportation, Inc. was founded in 1985 and reached it's peak of nearly 300 tractors and 400 employees in 2016.  At first we were a hopper bottom company and then we ran flatbeds too.  This was the makeup of the company until about 2010.  After the great recession we decided we had to try something else since flatbed all but went away during those years.  We tried refrigerated trailers for a few years but then we fell into dry vans and had success with those running out of the DFW market.  We quickly grew the van division to 200 tractors and 300 trailers hauling directly for top tier accounts such as Anheuser-Busch,Pactiv,Tempur Pedic,Electrolux,Clorox,Pepsi and many other Fortune 500 companies. 

Everything was going great until 2017 when the dry van market became very soft, rates dropped significantly and we couldn't downsize fast enough.  We didn't exactly go broke but we did have to re-organize and get back to profitable operations.  We cut our fleet in half only utilizing owner-operators in our Freedom Van Division and company drivers in our dedicated and OTR hopper divisions.  This put us back into profitable operations and we have done well ever since.  In 2019 we spun off most of our operations into a new company which today still runs 60 hopper bottom trucks. 

In 2019 we became an agent for a company that ceased to exist as of 2023.  We liked the agent model and how it outsourced our safety and administrative operations to another company.  Operating as an agent allowed us to focus on our customers and drivers.  We were with this agency from 2019-2023 and we downsized during the pandemic from owner-operators quitting at that time and then we downsized again in 2022 from owner-operators quitting when freight went south again after the boom.  What we were left with was most of our hopper bottom trucks which is what we started with in 1985.

In 2024 we feel it is time for a comeback in the flatbed and van markets and a revival of HCT.  We have our headquarters in Cleburne TX and 5 trucks ready for drivers to start serving our customers again.  While we mostly used to run the West with our flatbeds, our new focus for flatbeds  will be on running Texas, Midwest, Upper Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. We will re-establish our Texas to Colorado Dry Van routes. We have partnered with Packard Transport, LLC as an agent and are ready to serve small and large customers just as we did when we ran a large flatbed operation before 2010.