Estes Express Lines is investing nearly $56 million to expand its cross-border and offshore freight network, with spending directed toward terminals, equipment and additional capacity serving Canada, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
For Alex Peebles, Estes’ senior director of offshore and international, the strategy is being shaped by a longer-term view of the freight market rather than by current conditions alone.
“We’re really looking at all of these investments from a long-term horizon and viewpoint perspective and one that’s going to help accommodate growth and capacity into all the offshore international markets that we service,” Peebles told FreightWaves.
The privately held, family-owned carrier is celebrating its 95th anniversary this year and is North America’s largest privately held less-than-truckload (LTL) freight transportation provider. Estes operates a network of more than 300 terminals and service centers across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii, with coverage extending into Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.
Its ownership structure also gives Estes room to react quickly when opportunities involving real estate or equipment come up.
“We’re not looking past current market conditions, given how fluid everything is right now,” Peebles said. “But we’re also kind of maintaining course and looking at this from that longer-term lens.”
Estes doubling capacity at Laredo border gateway
Mexico is one of the key areas of opportunity behind the company’s expansion.
Estes currently reaches customers through 52 service centers across Mexico, supported by local sales personnel in both Mexico and Laredo. Peebles said the company’s Mexico business is growing this year, with Laredo serving as the primary gateway for freight crossing the southern U.S. border.
A significant portion of the nearly $56 million investment is going toward a larger Laredo facility that Estes purchased from another carrier and is now retrofitting.
The new facility is expected to nearly double Estes’ Laredo door count, from roughly 40 doors to about 85 or 86. It also includes warehouse space and a much larger yard.
That warehouse capacity could open additional possibilities for Estes beyond the traditional cross-dock activity typically associated with border operations.
“That’ll be a larger facility that we purchased from another carrier that we’ll be moving in sometime in the near future,” Peebles said. “That will also double our door count.”
Estes is also looking to make the Otay Mesa, California, and El Paso-Juarez border crossings more prominent parts of its Mexico network.
The carrier already moves some freight through both gateways, but Peebles sees opportunities to reduce mileage and make the network more efficient. Estes operates service centers in San Diego and El Paso, and is targeting the end of 2026 to introduce new routings through those crossings.
“We really think there’s a lot of network efficiencies and opportunities for mileage reduction by getting them more in play,” Peebles said.
Canada LTL freight grows despite tariff uncertainty
To the north, Estes has also been adding capacity at three gateways serving Canada.
The company officially opened its relocated Buffalo, New York, service center in June. The site has 171 doors, quadrupling Estes’ previous door count in Buffalo, and serves as an important gateway into Ontario.
The carrier has also nearly doubled its Detroit terminal to 139 doors, up from about 70, while doubling capacity at its Fargo, North Dakota, location.
Those investments come as trade relations between the U.S. and Canada remain uncertain.
Peebles said Estes’ Canada cross-border volumes entered 2026 at roughly 1% to 2% below the previous year, before turning upward around the end of February. Since then, the carrier has posted significant year-over-year LTL growth, although overall customer demand remains cautious.
Tariffs and retaliatory measures are influencing several commodities that regularly cross the border, including steel, paper, automotive products and electronics. Estes is closely monitoring those effects, but so far has not seen a major shift in overall volumes.
At the same time, one trend could provide an advantage for the LTL market.
Rather than dramatically redesigning their supply chains because of trade-policy uncertainty, some manufacturers are instead buying smaller quantities of cross-border goods, Peebles said. That change can move freight that once traveled as full truckloads into the LTL network.
“Manufacturers still need products,” Peebles said. “And if it is a cross-border supplier that they need, they’re just trying to order that in smaller quantities if they can, which naturally pivots to our world of LTL.”
Estes has also reported growth in its volume truckload (VTL) service between the U.S. and Canada. The service generally covers shipments weighing between 7,000 and 10,000 pounds.
According to Peebles, cross-border tonnage is increasing faster than shipment counts, while the average weight of a Canada shipment has risen by approximately 5% to 6% year over year.
Some of that increase is linked to shippers moving freight away from full truckload operations and into smaller shipments, he said.
Estes approaches 14,000 terminal doors
The cross-border projects form part of a broader expansion of the Estes LTL network.
The Richmond, Virginia-based carrier currently operates 13,857 terminal doors across roughly 300 locations, Peebles said. Provided construction stays on schedule, Estes expects to exceed 14,000 doors by the end of October.
The company’s investment program is continuing.
Over approximately the next year, capital spending is expected to shift more heavily toward equipment, including additional ocean containers and a large order of heated trailers designed to support next-day service to Canada.
Estes currently provides next-day service into Toronto from markets as far south as Virginia and as far west as the Chicago area. Peebles said performance on those shipments is running in the “high 90s.”
Offshore freight is another area where Estes plans to keep deploying capital.
The company says it is the only pure-play U.S. LTL carrier operating its own ocean container fleet serving Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Its 45-foot high-cube containers have historically focused on Alaska and Hawaii, but Estes expanded the fleet into Puerto Rico over the past year.
The carrier also opened a 29-door service center on Oahu in 2025. Estes says that combining its terminals, trucks and ocean containers enables it to keep shipments within its own network from mainland pickup through final delivery in Hawaii.
A shipment originating in Richmond, for example, can move across the country through the Estes network, be consolidated in California into an Estes-owned ocean container, and eventually be delivered in Honolulu by an Estes driver using an Estes truck.
The company’s consolidation points include Rancho Cucamonga, California, for Hawaii; the Seattle-Tacoma region for Alaska; and Jacksonville, Florida, primarily for Puerto Rico.
Despite near-term uncertainty surrounding freight demand and trade policy, Peebles said Estes intends to continue investing so that capacity is available when market conditions improve.
“We’re just looking at it from a longer-term perspective,” Peebles said. “I think we’re trying to find ways to take advantage of that now and make sure that our network is in a really good spot to be able to provide capacity when things switch around a little bit.”
Estes’ original investment information described the nearly $56 million program as a series of offshore, cross-border and international investments in fleet, infrastructure and capacity.
Why it matters
Estes’ expansion illustrates how a major LTL carrier is continuing to add cross-border capacity despite tariff uncertainty, including a substantially larger facility at the nation’s busiest U.S.-Mexico freight gateway.
