Trucking company opens $7M maintenance facility at Richmond outpost

The new A. Duie Pyle maintenance facility, pictured in the bottom right. (Courtesy Julia Cappiello)

A Pennsylvania trucking company has opened the doors to a new $7.6 million addition to its Richmond outpost. 

Freight carrier A. Duie Pyle recently unveiled its newly built 9,700-square-foot maintenance facility next to its logistics center at 3609 E. Belt Blvd., where it also operates a 16,500-square-foot freight hub. 

The building that was already onsite is what the company calls a less-than-truckload, or LTL, service center. Pyle officially opened the Richmond LTL facility in October of 2022 after paying $2 million for the site. 

The new maintenance facility will host technicians who do maintenance and repair work on the trucking company’s fleet. 

The project site for the maintenance facility was a formerly wooded portion of a parcel at 3715 Belt Blvd. adjacent to Pyle’s already existing facility. Pyle generally has a maintenance facility at every LTL facility location, said vice president of fleet maintenance Dan Carrano.

The property for the facility was purchased from Richmond-based W.E. Bowman Construction in November of 2023. Bowman was also the general contractor on the new facility, which took around 16 months to complete. The facility opened in February. 

The new maintenance facility, which Carrano said is standard size for Pyle, features three drive-through “work bays” for fleet technicians, one of which is equipped with a pit, and an additional bay that is a fully automated truck wash. 

The facility is Pyle’s first fully air-conditioned fleet maintenance facility, which Pyle said in a release will become a standard feature in all of its facilities in the future. 

Carrano said the trucking company tried to keep worker satisfaction in mind when crafting the new facility. 

“We try to create work environments that people want to come to everyday…we want people to wake up in the morning and want to come to work,” Carrano said.  

Other features of the new maintenance facility include polished and burnished floors, natural lighting and radiant heat flooring, warming the concrete Pyle workers stand on for comfort during colder months.

“We work on the floor, we don’t work on the ceiling,” Carrano said. “The heat rises through the concrete into the air, and it just makes it a tremendous work environment during the winter months.” 

Inside Pyle’s new Richmond maintenance facility. (Courtesy Julia Cappiello)

The new facility also has a women’s restroom. Pyle began incorporating women’s restrooms into its newly built facilities a few years ago, as more women have been entering the fleet technician profession, Carrano said. 

The new maintenance facility will operate five days per week and will bring three to four additional jobs to the area, according to a release from Pyle. Pyle is currently in the hiring process for the new roles, Carrano said.

Alongside opening the Richmond LTL facility in 2022, Pyle concurrently opened facilities in Roanoke and Manassas that same year. Both the Manassas and Richmond LTL facilities are owned by Pyle, while the Roanoke facility is leased. Pyle has plans to purchase the Roanoke facility later this year, Carrano said. 

The Richmond LTL facility has 50 service doors for trucks to load and unload cargo, while the Manassas facility has 30 service doors and the Roanoke facility has 16 service doors.

Pyle’s COO of LTL solutions John Luciani previously told BizSense the company spent $20 million to acquire its Virginia LTL facilities.

Pyle currently employs 52 at its Richmond facilities. There are 155 Pyle employees total across the Richmond, Roanoke and Manassas facilities.

Based out of West Chester, Pennsylvania, Pyle was founded in 1924 and currently operates 32 LTL facilities and 16 warehouses across the East Coast. Two additional Virginia facilities are planned for Norfolk and Fredericksburg, to open in late 2026 or 2027.

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