Who ships lumber, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships lumber

Head offices and named mills. Each of these runs many sites, and which ones are running changes with the market.

Ask for the mill's traffic manager, and separately for the reload centre. Mills tender long-haul outbound, much of it on rail with truck covering the gaps and the short runs. Reload centres and wholesale distributors handle the truck legs constantly and are far more broker-friendly than a mill on a rail contract. Start with the reloads.

Where it hauls

Two producing regions and a distribution layer between them and the yard. The US South is southern yellow pine, with mills across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and east Texas. The Pacific Northwest and inland west run Douglas fir, hem-fir and inland species out of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and northern California. Between mill and lumberyard sit reload centres, where rail cars are broken down onto trucks, and they are often the easiest freight to win. The producers to know:

How to open

The useful follow-up is about curtailments. Mills have been taking downtime, and asking which of their sites are running tells you where the freight actually is rather than where the map says it should be.

Qualifying questions

• What does it scale, and is it kiln dried? Green lumber is much heavier than kiln dried and will put you over on a load that looked fine on paper. Ask which it is and get the target gross before you commit a trailer.
• Tarps, and how many? Finished lumber tarps; framing stock to a yard sometimes does not. Wet lumber stains and swells and the claim is real. Confirm the requirement and who supplies the tarps.
• Mill direct, reload, or yard? Mill outbound is long haul and often rail-competitive. Reload centres run short truck legs constantly. Yard delivery is short and frequent. Three different businesses, ask which one.
• How is it secured, and how long are the units? Banded units shift and settle, and long stock overhangs. Confirm unit lengths, the securement expectation and whether anything needs flags or permits.
• Which of your mills are actually running? Curtailments are common and a mill on downtime has no freight. This question tells you where the loads are this month rather than where they were last year.

When to call

January and February, while buyers are positioning against the coming build season. March to November is the haul, and by then capacity is committed. The market is genuinely volatile, which cuts in your favour: a mill that has watched carriers disappear during a price spike remembers whoever stayed.