View the PDF of the CCJ Top 250.

Based on the top line, 2008 wasn’t a horrible year for North America’s top for-hire trucking companies, but the top line includes record-high fuel surcharges. With freight soft and costs high, many shed trucks and drivers but kept rolling.

If you look only at the gross revenue numbers for North America’s 250 largest trucking companies, 2008 didn’t seem like such a bad year. Among those for-hire carriers for which revenue numbers were available to CCJ, total revenue rose 3.9 percent – not a great year by any stretch, but certainly not clearly disastrous. Without behemoths UPS and FedEx, whose scope tends to skew the results in the CCJ Top 250, trucking companies still eked out a 2.9 percent gain.

Unfortunately, most trucking companies wrap their fuel surcharges into total revenues. So when you consider that diesel prices averaged a third higher in 2008 than in 2007, the meager revenue gains for 2008 begin to appear far from healthy.

Indeed, you get a much better picture of what happened in 2008 – and continues in 2009 – by looking at the power unit and driver situation. Accurate year-over-year comparisons are difficult because much of the CCJ Top 250 equipment and driver data is based on government records that aren’t necessarily updated each year. Still, you can see the trend. Isolating just those carriers that were in the CCJ Top 250 in both 2008 and 2007, the number of straight trucks and tractors dropped 5.8 percent, and the number of drivers declined 1.1 percent. Excluding UPS and FedEx, the Top 250′s power unit fleet declined 7.5 percent, and the number of drivers dropped 5.1 percent from 2007.

Remarkable perseverance
But while many big fleets downsized, surprisingly few failed last year. No doubt, one factor – especially for truckload carriers – was the rollercoaster ride of diesel prices. If a carrier somehow managed to make it to the fall when the rest of the economy seemed near collapse, its near-term prospects were good largely because of the lag between booking surcharges and receiving them. Plummeting diesel prices in the second half of the year acted to boost cash flow.

The largest outright failure from last year’s Top 250 appears to be Chesterton, Ind.-based Priority Transportation, which ceased operations in September 2008. Priority had ranked No. 133, having slipped from No. 96 the year before. In addition, two major carriers – Performance Transportation Services and Jevic Transportation – had failed in 2008, but both occurred before last year’s CCJ Top 250 was published.