Roadlink Gets Products Moving From the Dock to Your Door

By George Walsh, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

If you've every driven or rode on BART past the Oakland shipyard on your way to a Raiders, Athletics, or Golden State Warriors game, you may have wondered about the logistics of getting those giant containers of products off the ships and on to their destinations. Here, as in nearly every other part of North America, RoadLink USA, with Pacific facilities located at 4309 Hacienda Drive, plays a large part in moving truckloads of nearly every type of product imaginable to and from just about anywhere in the continental U.S.

"What we do is called 'intermodal trucking,'" says Tom Hand, Vice President and controller for RoadLink USA, Pacific. "We take the containers that come off of the ocean liners at the ports. They're either put on a railroad or put onto a truck. Then, we return the containers back to the railroad or the ocean liner. We're the West Coast operation for a national trucking company. RoadLink USA is the first national intermodal trucking company. It was formed back in the year 2000."

In fact, RoadLink USA is America's largest national intermodal trucking system, with resources of approximately 1,500 trucks and drivers, and 50 service locations coast-to-coast. Expansion plans are in place to increase the company's capacity to become a player in every key market in North America. RoadLink USA provides customers with a broad array of intermodal logistics services, along with transportation management support that includes container yards and management, equipment and storage, warehousing, U.S. Customs bonded freight stations, product sorting and distribution, and rail terminals.

"In our business, the customers that we work for are called third-party intermediaries, brokers, or logistics groups," says Dennis Van Wagner, CEO of RoadLink USA Pacific. "The cargo could be anything that goes in a container, whether it goes to a train or a truck. It could go to a retail distribution center, it could go to a consumer, as long as it gets to wherever it needs to be sold," says CEO Dennis Van Wagner. RoadLink USA Pacific is one of several RoadLink USA divisions. Also included under the company' banner are RoadLink USA South, RoadLink USA Midwest, RoadLink USA Southwest, and other divisions that are part of the company but have yet to be converted to being a namesake of the RoadLink family. "All of the individual brand names of the different trucking and logistics companies will eventually go away and will all become divisions of RoadLink USA," Dennis Van Wagner says. As an example, RoadLink USA Pacific, one of the original companies that comprised the backbone of RoadLink USA, was formerly called Hawk Pacific Corporation. In the Midwest, there were four companies that comprised the company's operations in that region that have been consolidated as another division of RoadLink USA.

On the West Coast, RoadLink works with some 200 companies that need to distribute goods. RoadLink Pacific does their work in the Pacific Northwest from the Canadian borders down to Mexico. "There are rail heads and ocean ports up and down the coast and we have trucks that can move containers out of all of them," Van Wagner says.

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