Stoughton to add 700 trailer production plant staff

Workers at a Stoughton Trailers manufacturing plant in Stoughton, Wis. (Stoughton Trailers)

Stoughton Trailers plans to add 700 mostly production line staff in 2027 due to improved replacement demand, especially for dry van trailers, President and CEO Bob Wahlin said Nov. 9.

The upcoming workforce expansion for Stoughton comes after the trailer manufacturer already added 450 team members in the second half of 2026, the company’s top executive said in an exclusive interview.

Currently, the Stoughton, Wis.-based company has around 1,800 employees. Almost all the latest recruits and future head count additions will be shop floor personnel, Wahlin told Transport Topics.

As the second quarter of 2026 progressed, Stoughton’s top executive said, the company’s backlog was around three to four months, but now it is around 6½ months.

All the 2026 hires were brought in at the Stoughton, Evansville and Brodhead manufacturing plants in Wisconsin.

In 2027, around 150 to 175 of the new hires will be brought in at the company’s Waco, Texas, facility.

The Stoughton plant — the company’s largest — houses all the component manufacturing operations for the subassemblies of trailers and chassis. It also has production lines for the assembly of dry van and chassis products.

Stoughton’s facility in Evansville builds refrigerated trailers and intermodal chassis. The Brodhead facility manufactures dry van semitrailers. The Waco site manufactures intermodal chassis.

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Stoughton Trailers President and CEO Bob Wahlin. (The Select Committee on the CCP via YouTube)

Following the expansions, the company expects to have an annualized production capacity of 110,000 trailers and container chassis, Wahlin said.

The company expects the 2027 hires to be put to work building dry and refrigerated van trailers, Wahlin said, adding that 2026’s hires were mostly for van trailer production alongside some additions on the grain trailer side.

“We’ve had a lot of customers kind of come back to life. A lot of people have held off on purchasing their equipment through much of 2026,” said Wahlin, but that began to change as the second half of the year started.

The top reason for the increase in demand, Wahlin said, was fleets’ replacement demand needs. Carriers held off on purchases because of weak freight rates, but now — with the rebound in spot and contract rates — capital expenditure is on the rise, he added.

“The average age of the equipment has been increasing over the last couple years in particular,” he said, adding: “continued freight rate improvement is getting people to kind of kick back into their normal equipment replacement cycles. And I think they have some catching up to do, so to speak.”

ACT Research preliminary data showed orders soared 311% year over year to 42,700 units in September, and also rose 75% compared with August.

FTR Transportation Intelligence data on September trailer orders showed a 385% year-over-year increase to 43,059 units, which the research group said was the highest tally since December 2022.

Some of Stoughton’s peers are also increasing production line output and staffing levels due to the rosier demand prospects for 2027 and beyond.

Wabash plans to increase dry van production line staffing in the fourth quarter of 2026 after already raising hourly head count on those lines by 15% in the third quarter, the company’s top executive said Oct. 29.

The increase in head count was moved up from the first quarter of 2027, CEO Brent Yeagy told analysts and investors during Wabash’s third-quarter 2026 earnings call. As recently as March, the company was cutting jobs due to a surplus of trailers.