Edmonton

Description

What’s included: $8,115 flat truck rate covers fuel and deadhead, size/weight limits (800 lbs, 5’7″ bed, 60″ height max — larger loads require the trailer at $10,145), layover ($375) and detention ($140/hr — 30 min free at pickup, 30 min free at drop-off, tracked separately) apply on top if triggered.

The run from Vancouver

Edmonton is about 1,150 km out, 12 to 13 hours one way. The route runs Highway 1 to Hope, the Coquihalla and Yellowhead South to Tête Jaune Cache, then Highway 16 east through Jasper. That crossing matters: Yellowhead Pass tops out at 1,131 m, the lowest highway crossing of the Rockies in Canada. Compared with the Rogers and Kicking Horse route into Calgary, it holds up better in winter and closes less often. The alternative — Highway 1 to Calgary, then the QEII north — adds roughly 100 km and two more summits. We use it only when conditions on Highway 16 say to.

What moves here

Edmonton is the staging point for the oil sands, northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Freight that lands here often is not staying here. Alberta’s Industrial Heartland sits immediately northeast: 582 km² of hydrocarbon processing, 40-plus petrochemical companies and around 25,000 jobs, making it the largest single area in Canada dedicated to that work. Imperial Oil’s Strathcona refinery runs 187,000 barrels a day. Shell’s Scotford complex operates an upgrader, a refinery and two railyards of its own. Turnarounds at these plants are when urgent parts demand spikes hardest. On the rail side, CN consolidated its North American traffic control into Edmonton in 2020. The city counted 1,010,899 people in 2021, and its metro area grew 3.0% in the year to July 2025 — the fastest of any metro in Canada.

Scales and seasonal limits

Leduc VIS on the QEII south of the city is the station most southbound loads pass. Hinton VIS sits on Highway 16 west, and Spruce Grove and Ardrossan cover the eastern approaches. Alberta road bans are set as a percentage of legal axle weight — 90%, 75% or 50% — and trigger on a thaw depth of 25 cm rather than a calendar date. Frost depth of 75 cm starts the winter weight season instead. Orders come out through the provincial road ban list and the 1-855-ROADBAN line, not through 511 Alberta, which only links to them.

Local fun fact

The Quest carbon capture facility at Scotford started up on 23 August 2015 and now stores roughly a million tonnes of CO₂ a year — 1,003 kilotonnes in 2023 alone — injected deep underground about a third of the way through the Scotford upgrader’s total emissions.