PS Logistics buys Roane Transportation: a 170-driver Tennessee flatbed and Conestoga fleet joins Loudon County Trucking

Loudon County Trucking, a subsidiary of PS Logistics, has acquired Roane Transportation Services, Roane Logistics and B&W Leasing, according to Commercial Carrier Journal on Nov. 5. Financial terms were not disclosed. Roane will operate as Roane Transportation, a division of Loudon County Trucking, with co-founder Steve Kennedy remaining at the helm of the division — the standard PS Logistics pattern of buying a regional fleet and keeping its local leadership in place.

The company being bought is a substantial flatbed operation, not a tuck-in. Headquartered in Rockwood, Tennessee, and founded in 1996 by Steve Kennedy and Luke Wyatt, Roane is a privately owned flatbed and Conestoga shipping company with operations in Tennessee and Texas. It operates more than 170 company, lease-purchase and owner-operator drivers, hauling aluminum, steel, electrical products and building materials primarily across the Southeast and Midwest. Through Roane Logistics it also offers freight brokerage and warehousing services, which means PS is buying a small network — trucks, a brokerage and warehouse capability — rather than a single fleet’s authority and equipment.

The buyer’s logic, as PS stated it, is geography plus freight mix. Roane’s geographic coverage and freight mix are complementary to the existing PS network, and the acquisition strengthens PS Logistics’ presence in East Tennessee, expanding its footprint in a region critical to the aluminum manufacturing sector, said Houston Vaughn, president of PS Logistics’ trucking division. Aluminum matters in that sentence: Roane already hauls it, East Tennessee is where a significant share of it is made, and a flatbed network that can serve aluminum producers from inside their home region starts with an advantage a generalist has to build lane by lane.

Kennedy’s statement was aimed at the people whose freight and jobs are changing hands. “This partnership is a strong cultural fit,” Kennedy said. “Both companies put drivers first, value integrity and safety, and treat people with respect. For our team and customers, it means we keep the local leadership, culture, and service you know while gaining the resources and scale to invest further in our people and operations.” That is the commitment drivers at an acquired fleet should hold the buyer to: the division keeps its name, its founder keeps his seat, and the stated reason for the deal is the network around the fleet, not a plan to fold the trucks into a distant terminal system.

The Roane deal also extends one of the longest acquisition runs in trucking. PS Logistics is No. 21 on the CCJ Top 250, and since 2016 it has acquired and integrated 32 trucking operations and five non-asset logistics operations nationwide — Roane makes 33 trucking deals in a decade. The run is not slowing at the edges of the business either: just last month, TA Services, the non-asset flagship division of PS Logistics, acquired the assets and operations of Carmen Pacheco Transportation and Interload Forwarding, each a family-owned transportation and logistics business serving customers across the United States, Mexico and Canada. That acquisition expanded TA’s cross-border transportation and warehousing capabilities and strengthened its presence in two key border markets, El Paso and Laredo, Texas. In the space of about a month, the same parent has bought cross-border brokerage and warehousing capacity at the southern border and a 170-driver flatbed fleet in East Tennessee.

That pattern is worth naming for what it is. While the industry’s attention sits on enforcement-driven capacity exits and carrier failures, a well-capitalized flatbed platform is still buying — family-owned fleets with real freight, real drivers and regional density, in deals where the founders stay and the brand survives as a division. Roane was founded in 1996 and ran for three decades as a private company; it now becomes one division among dozens inside a Top 250 platform. For the drivers involved, an acquisition of this kind usually changes the letterhead, the benefits administrator and the capital behind the equipment before it changes the freight — and the freight, aluminum and steel across the Southeast and Midwest, is exactly what PS said it bought.

The practical takeaway splits by seat. Roane drivers should watch the integration for the things Kennedy’s quote promises: local leadership retained, culture and service kept, and new investment in people and operations — and judge the deal against those words over the next two quarters. Drivers at other mid-size flatbed fleets in the Southeast should read the deal as a market signal: buyers with PS’s record are still paying for established, founder-led flatbed capacity with industrial freight, even in a year defined by exits. And shippers moving aluminum out of East Tennessee now have one fewer independent option and one larger network to negotiate with — the consolidation that enforcement headlines obscure is continuing underneath them, one 170-driver fleet at a time.