Transloading
Move freight from ocean container to truck — palletized or floor-loaded — at our Kent facility minutes from the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma.
Transloading is transferring cargo from an inbound ocean container into outbound trucks — so you ship full truckloads inland instead of paying to move air in a 40-foot box. Ad Hoc Logistics drays your container off the Port of Seattle or Port of Tacoma and transloads it under one roof, the same day where the schedule allows. One company handles the pull, the transload and the outbound — no second carrier, no handoff gaps.
What's included
Cargo comes in on pallets and goes out on pallets — clean, counted, scanned and loaded out.
Floor-loaded freight is built onto pallets, restacked and shrink-wrapped as needed for the outbound.
Direct container-to-trailer transfer with minimal dwell — ideal for time-critical freight.
Restack, sort, shrink-wrap and prep so the load is ready for its next leg.
We arrange the outbound truckload or LTL delivery to your final destination.
Hold product at our yard between the transload and the outbound — short or long term.
Transloading near the terminals lets you consolidate ocean containers into domestic truckloads, return the empty fast (avoiding per-diem), and push freight inland at a lower per-unit cost. Our facility sits in the heart of the Kent–Fife–Sumner warehouse corridor, so the dray from the terminal is short and the outbound options are wide.
Pair transloading with our container drayage and warehousing & 3PL for one accountable team from the port to the pallet.
Transloading by port: Port of Seattle transloading and Port of Tacoma transloading.
Cross docking is freight that never gets put away. It comes in one door, gets sorted or consolidated on the floor, and goes out the other door the same day — no rack, no pick, no storage charge. The dock is a conveyor, not a warehouse.
It is the right call when you already know where every carton is going before the container lands: retail orders allocated in advance, a distributor splitting one box across four consignees, or a consolidation where three inbound loads have to leave as one outbound truckload. It is the wrong call when the freight has to wait for orders — then you want warehousing, and paying dock labor to touch it twice helps nobody.
We run cross docking out of our Kent, WA facility, which sits between the Seattle and Tacoma terminals. Because our own trucks pull the containers, the inbound side of a cross dock is something we control rather than something we wait for — which is most of what makes a same-day transfer actually happen on the day.
A large share of ocean freight arrives floor-loaded — hand-stacked to the ceiling with no pallets, because pallets cost cube and cube costs ocean freight. Then it reaches a domestic dock that only accepts pallets, and somebody has to build them.
That somebody is us. We hand-unload floor-loaded boxes, build pallets to the pattern and height the receiver wants, wrap, label and load out. It is slower than a palletized transload and priced accordingly, and it is worth knowing which one you have before you quote the job. If the pallets also need to meet a retailer's routing guide, that is pallet rework and we do it on the same floor.
Transloading is location work, so it has its own pages: transloading for Port of Tacoma imports and transloading for Port of Seattle imports. Both run through the same Kent dock; the difference is the drayage leg and which terminals your box comes off.
Transloading transfers cargo between modes (ocean container to truck) and often re-palletizes it; cross-docking moves freight from one trailer straight to another with little or no storage. We do both.
Most containers are transloaded the same day the box is drayed in, schedule permitting. Send us your volume and timing for a firm window.
Yes — floor-loaded freight is built onto pallets, restacked and wrapped for the outbound truck.
Normally per pallet or per hundredweight for a straight transfer, plus the inbound drayage if we pull the container. Floor-loaded freight is priced by the hour or per container because the labor is the job. Send the container count and whether it is floor-loaded or palletized.
Our dock is in Kent, which is roughly 20 minutes from the Seattle terminals and 25 from Tacoma. For a cross dock that is the right distance — close enough for a same-day turn, far enough to have real floor space.
Yes. Inbound truckloads, LTL consolidations and rail-ramp freight all cross the same dock.
A true cross dock ships the same day. If it needs to sit longer than that, we will tell you it is storage and price it as storage rather than letting it quietly occupy dock space.
Container to pallet
Floor-loaded or palletized, we move your freight from the container onto pallets or a waiting truck under one roof — no second carrier, no handoff gap.
Request a transload quoteTell us your container count and destination — we'll quote the dray plus the transload together.
Request a transload quote