Via

My route is Des Moines to Rock Island. But they have freight for Waterloo. So instead of going straight to Rock Island I VIA to Waterloo then go to Rock Island.

 

It can mean that you are making a stop off route of a straight lane to destination. Like we would see BOL’s from Nitto Tire when we were getting them from the Japan plant in conex boxes. The BOL would state from Port of Long Beach to destination of San Antonio Via Houston. Why they passed us and went to Houston first and then back to us I do not know. But They never really left the I-10 corridor.

 

It’s not really all that common in LTL either. It’s either XPO or FedEx Freight that uses it all the time . I worked with CFCC back in the late 80’s and early 90’s and CF just before the shutdown and then almost a decade with R&L and I had never heard the term via in an LTL context till I started visiting another board geared specifically to LTL and reading the company posts. Kinda like R&L and the term they use for the converter dolly. They call it a “joe dog”. Many of the old timers at the old LTL’s would talk about “stem time”, the amount of time you spent getting to the area where you peddled freight, a play on stem and petals of a plant, stem is straight to the flower and it’s “petals”. You drive pretty much straight to your area and then start looping back and forth for pickups and deliveries

 

Hawkeye is correct, it's for linehaul. For example, I may go from my home service center in Rockaway NJ to Hagerstown, MD, but if there's a trailer that needs to get to Hagerstown from Newark I'll take a loaded trailer plus an empty to Newark, drop the empty and hook their trailer, putting it in front if it's heavier than my trailer and take them both to Hagerstown. You move empties because you always want to leave with the same number of trailers you arrive with, so each service center keeps the right number of trailers.