Hot Shot Shipping

When Your Freight Can't Wait

A production line goes down. A crew is standing around a job site waiting on material. An order that has to be on a shelf next week is sitting in the wrong province. Standard freight schedules weren't built for any of these situations, and waiting for the next scheduled pickup isn't an option when every hour costs you money. Hot shot shipping exists for exactly these moments.

What is Hot Shot Shipping?

Hot shot shipping is an expedited freight service where your shipment travels directly from pickup to delivery on a vehicle arranged specifically for it. There's no consolidation with other freight and no scheduled pickup window to wait for, which is what makes it faster than standard shipping options. We put your freight on the right vehicle and send it straight where it needs to be, with no waiting for a truck to fill up and no detours along the way.

Equipment Matched to What You're Moving

Most urgent freight doesn't need a 53-foot trailer, and paying for one you can't fill is a waste. We match the vehicle to your load rather than defaulting to whatever is easiest to book:

• Cargo and sprinter vans for small parts, samples, documents, and components that need to move now
• Straight trucks for loads that have outgrown a van but don't justify a full trailer
• Hot shot trailers for equipment, machinery, and awkward freight requiring deck space
• Flat decks and dry vans with team drivers for urgent loads that are genuinely large, or that need to cover serious distance without stopping
• Air freight when the timeline is tight enough that ground transport simply won't make it

Those last two options are where hot shot shipping with C&D differs from most providers. If your urgent shipment is bigger than a hot shot trailer can handle, we don't tell you it isn't a hot shot load. We put standard equipment on it with two drivers so the truck keeps rolling around the clock. This option is best for urgent freight of almost any size, production-critical parts, job site material, time-locked deliveries, and shipments where a missed deadline costs more than the freight itself.

How Fast Can We Get Started?

That depends on two things: when you call, and where the pickup is.

Requests that come in during the morning can usually be picked up the same day. If your freight is ready to go now, we can arrange pickup as soon as you need it. The main variable is distance from a major centre, since a pickup well outside a metro area takes longer to arrange than one in the Lower Mainland or Calgary.

Rather than promise a blanket response time we can't guarantee for every location, we'll tell you what's realistic for your specific pickup and destination when you call. If same-day isn't possible for your lane, you'll know that immediately instead of finding out after you've committed.

Industries That Rely on Hot Shot Freight

Urgent freight tends to travel in industries where downtime is expensive:

Manufacturing. A machine on a production line fails, and a large order is due out the following week. The replacement parts need to arrive fast enough that the schedule holds.

Construction. Material was underestimated on a build with a hard completion date. A new facility was opening to prospective clients within weeks, and the remaining material had to be rushed in to finish the building before they arrived.

Mining, aerospace, and film. Remote sites, tight production schedules, and specialized components that can't be sourced locally. When a shoot is on the clock or a site crew is waiting, freight timing drives everything else.

A Recent Hot Shot Success

A mining client needed a project shipment picked up in Calgary on a Tuesday night and delivered to Rhode Island by Friday at noon. That's more than 4,000 kilometres and roughly 44 hours of driving, with a hard deadline attached.

We put the load on a flat deck with team drivers so the truck never had to stop for rest, and coordinated the run against the delivery window. The freight safely arrived on time.