Freight Shipping FAQ: Reefer, Flatbed, Insurance
Answers shippers ask before the first load: equipment, coverage in all 48 states, insurance and claims, tracking, and how carriers are verified.
What shippers ask before the first tender.
Straight answers, including the ones that are a no. Grouped by what you are trying to find out, and every answer with a page behind it links to it.
A person picks up. No ticket queue.
Which is a fair reason to just ask. Dispatch answers the same business day, and faster on the phone.
Working with us
Do you handle LTL and partial shipments?
Yes. LTL and partials are quoted by the same desk that quotes truckload, so a couple of pallets gets the same person and the same standard as a full load. Sometimes the right answer is a partial on our own equipment, and we will tell you when it is.
Do you offer warehousing?
Yes, at our Vancouver, Washington facility: storage, cross dock and transload, connected to our own fleet, so freight moves in and out without a handoff between companies.
How do I get set up as a customer?
One phone call. Call (360) 719-5660 or send the contact form, we set up your account and credit terms, and you can tender your first load as soon as setup is done. No portal signup and no packet of forms before we will talk to you.
What do you haul?
Refrigerated, flatbed and step deck, dry van, warehouse services, expedited, oversize and permitted heavy haul, project or capex freight, and LTL and partials. All quoted in-house by the same person, so a mixed lane gets one answer instead of three. We are domestic only, all 48 states.
Can you cover my volume?
Loads that fit our own fleet move on our own equipment, reefer first. Past the fleet, a verified carrier network concentrated on the lanes our accounts run covers the rest. Where the answer is no is extreme volume on one lane, and we will tell you that on the first call.
How do I know the carrier that shows up is the one you booked?
Driver name, tractor number and trailer number reach you before pickup, and if any of them changes you hear it from us, not from your receiver. The broker-carrier agreement carries an explicit no-re-brokering clause, and a third name on the bill of lading is treated as a reportable incident.
Do you own trucks?
Yes. A fleet of more than 150 tractors and trailers of our own, family owned since 2004, with our own drivers and our own maintenance shop. When your freight needs more than our fleet, our brokerage desk covers it with verified carriers.
How fast do I get a quote?
Same business day on a complete lane request. If the load needs permits we tell you the lead time before you commit to a delivery date: standard oversize review is 24 to 48 business hours, and superheavy is weeks, not days.
Do you have a shipper portal?
Yes, our own. The Skyline TMS is built in-house: shipments searchable by your reference, live tracking, driver name and phone, and invoices that download with the POD attached. And your rep still answers the phone; the portal adds to the desk, it never replaces it.
Are you a broker or a carrier?
Both. An asset-based carrier with our own fleet, and a property brokerage that adds verified capacity when a load needs more than the fleet. Authority and insurance documentation goes out with every quote, where shippers check it.
Where are you based, and how far do you go?
Three offices: Vancouver, Washington, Sacramento, California and Austin, Texas. We run freight in all 48 states.
Carriers and vetting
How do you vet carriers?
Seven checks at every tender, not once at onboarding: identity against the FMCSA record, authority status and age, insurance confirmed with the producer, CSA BASICs, a fraud and double-brokering screen, signed agreement with tracking consent, then verification at pickup. Every step is timestamped and archived in the carrier file.
Why does vetting at tender matter more than at onboarding?
Authority and insurance can lapse at any time, so a check done at onboarding can be months out of date. We re-check at every tender. If a carrier’s authority went inactive last week, a check from last quarter will not catch it, and the load is already gone.
Will you re-broker my load?
No. The broker-carrier agreement carries an explicit no-re-brokering and no-co-brokering clause, and a third name on the bill of lading ends the relationship. That is the only rule we describe as absolute.
Can I see your carrier-selection file?
Yes. On a brokered load we can produce our qualification standard and the verification record for the specific load: what was checked, when, and by whom. On a fleet load the file is our own driver, equipment and safety record.
I am a carrier. How do I get set up?
Two fields to start: your MC or USDOT number and a contact email. The rest of the packet is four steps, and the form never asks for your bank details. Banking is set up after approval, out of band, verified by callback to the number on the FMCSA record.
Insurance and claims
What coverage does Skyline carry?
We carry $500,000 in cargo coverage and $2,000,000 in liability coverage. Critical and high-value freight is our specialty, and the coverage is sized for it. Certificates of insurance are available same day on request.
What insurance do you require of carriers?
$1,000,000 auto liability and $100,000 cargo minimum, higher by commodity, plus general liability and statutory workers’ compensation. On temperature freight we require reefer breakdown affirmatively endorsed. Those are our contract terms, not regulation.
Is $100,000 cargo a legal minimum?
No. Cargo limits on truckload are contractual, not federal, which is why we state ours: $100,000 minimum, higher by commodity, required on every carrier we dispatch.
Does cargo insurance cover a spoiled reefer load?
Not by default. Base motor truck cargo policies exclude loss from temperature variation, so reefer breakdown has to be affirmatively endorsed, and it covers mechanical or electrical failure of the unit, not a driver who set the wrong temperature. We ask for the endorsement by name and tell you what we found.
How is a claim handled?
Notice filed the day it is known, with the POD and photographs already on file, not reconstructed afterwards. A claim is won or lost on paperwork that existed before the load went wrong.
On the load
What tracking will I get?
A cadence agreed before dispatch. Pickup and delivery confirmations at minimum, hourly on a tight window, the reefer or ELD feed where the carrier supports it, and the first ping inside 30 minutes of dispatch.
What happens on a temperature excursion?
The procedure is agreed before the truck rolls: who we call, at what deviation, what the receiver will accept, and who authorizes a reconsignment or a claim. If we catch a temperature problem two hours in, we can usually save the load. If nobody catches it until delivery, it is a claim. So we agree the monitoring plan before the truck rolls.
When does a load need a permit?
Once it exceeds the legal size or weight limits of any state it travels through. Those limits differ by state and get amended without much notice, so we read them per route, every time. Past the limit it is permits, and possibly escorts or a route survey.
Does the permit change when the load leaves the state?
Often, and this is the most common failure mode we see. A load that is legal or cheaply permitted where it loads can need a height permit and a second escort one state line later. We permit the whole route before you commit to a delivery date, not the first leg and the rest afterwards.
What are your payment terms for carriers?
Standard terms are 30 days. Quick pay is a stated discount off linehaul for payment inside 72 hours, written on the agreement.
Do you handle drop trailers?
On recurring lanes, yes, once we know how the dock runs. A drop program costs trailer pool and pays back in detention and dock throughput. On a one-off it rarely makes sense.