LTL Liftgate Freight Service Information

Although most items can be unloaded manually, even if the crate needs to be taken apart, a lift gate may be a nice addition to make things easier.

• A lift gate is an add-on offered by freight companies to facilitate unloading items from the back of the truck to the ground. This is vey helpful when unloading smaller crates / pallets, but it may not help with longer ones.
• It is your responsibility to unload items from the truck. While drivers will normally help, they are not required to do so. In residential locations, when an item is shipped on a truck with a lift gate, drivers have a pallet jack and will unload smaller crates, however, if your order has 20' gutters for example, there's no reason to add a lift gate as your items would not fit on it.
• What most customers do: Commercial customers normally have a fork lift. Residential customers normally don't and unload items by hand. You may also opt to break up the packaging / crate and unload items manually this way if the packaging as a whole is too heavy.
• Freight trucks do not have a fork lift, like your local building supply store does. As stated above, drivers will normally help you unload, but they are not required to by the freight company.