Leo Wilkins specializes in hauling medium-duty truck bodies and highway construction safety equipment.

Advanced handling. Extra-heavy labor. Elaborate LTL logistics. Special hauls often require moreof an owner-operator than ordinary loads, but the financial rewards compensate well.

Dale Wiederholt used to haul what most truckers would consider ideal loads. His small Wisconsin-based fleet would pick up blanket-wrapped furniture from manufacturers in Southern California and deliver to warehouses from Colorado to the East Coast.

“We billed it on a percentage of the invoice,” he says. “We could make more money in one load going east than a lot of guys could make in a round trip.”

About four years ago, Chinese companies began shipping containers of similar furniture at a much cheaper cost to the United States. Within a year, the U.S. manufacturers were going out of business, and Wiederholt’s sweet hauls had turned sour.

Such niche hauls typically survive economic downturns, in part because they’re often built on a close relationship between shippers or brokers and carriers. Wiederholt’s, for example, lasted 15 years. In many cases, the hauls are less-than-truckload (LTL), made up of several smaller pickups. As a result, the logistics of assembling them frequently requires physical labor in all kinds of weather. Often, they’re tightly scheduled, or may require waiting out a tardy shipper.

“If it were easy, everyone would do it,” says Joe Rajkovacz, director of regulatory affairs at the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and a former LTL hauler. For all the drawbacks, “the financial rewards are second to none” and the business is more consistent, he says. While many carriers either don’t want these hauls or don’t know about them, the operators who concentrate on them say they would do nothing else.

Where the loads are