20 Trucking Companies From the 1970s That Are Still Running

Yellow is gone. Roadway is gone. Consolidated Freightways is gone. PIE is gone. Every giant a driver could name in 1975 went in the ground. These twenty didn't. Some of them you know. ABF was called Arkansas-Best Freight System the whole time you were driving, and it's still the last big union LTL carrier standing. Estes is the largest privately held freight carrier in America and the founder's great-grandson runs it. Saia started with the family car and the back seats taken out, and there's still a Saia terminal in Houma, Louisiana. Some of them you probably don't. CRST ran its first year out of a $125 chicken coop. Marten Transport started on $400 borrowed from a seventeen-year-old's mother. Prime Inc. spent four and a half years in Chapter 11 and came out the other side. Schneider's orange wasn't a marketing decision, it was a condition of a 1944 purchase they've been stuck with ever since. And one of them got sold nine months ago after ninety-two years in the same family. Most drivers still don't know. Number twenty is a company nobody at a truck stop in 1975 would have bet a dollar on. It's worth more today than Yellow, Roadway and Consolidated Freightways were ever worth put together. Tell me in the comments which one of these twenty you pulled for, and whether you'd go back.