Does my product need a loading dock or grade-level access?
Dock, grade, or neither: how your freight gets in.
4 min read · Updated August 1, 2026
Does my product need a loading dock or grade-level access?
A dock door sits at truck-bed height, roughly four feet above the yard, so a trailer backs onto it and goods roll straight across on a pallet truck or forklift. A grade-level door sits at floor height, so a vehicle or a wheeled machine can be driven directly into the building. Palletised, crated and cartoned goods only need docks. Anything that must be driven or rolled in under its own power — machinery, vehicles, some large equipment — needs grade-level access or a portable yard ramp, because it cannot be lifted off a flatbed at a dock. Rolls Right's Vancouver facility at 3200 E Broadway has 20 dock doors plus 4 grade-level doors; the Calgary facility at 4770 68 Avenue SE has 12 dock doors and no drive-in, so rolling stock is handled in Vancouver.
This is a small technical distinction that causes an expensive, entirely avoidable problem: a machine turns up on a lowbed at a building that physically cannot unload it, and it goes away again on the same truck.
It takes two minutes to check and almost nobody asks.
The two door types
A dock door is raised to meet a trailer bed, usually around four feet. The trailer reverses in, a leveller bridges the gap, and product rolls across horizontally. This is what the overwhelming majority of warehouse doors are, and it handles anything on a pallet, in a crate or in cartons.
A grade-level door — sometimes called a drive-in door — is at floor level, like a garage. A van, a truck or a machine on wheels can go straight in. Buildings usually have very few of these, and plenty have none.
What decides which you need
It comes down to how the item leaves the vehicle, not what the item is.
- Palletised, crated, cartoned or skidded — docks are fine, and generally faster
- Driven or rolled in under its own power — needs grade level, or a ramp
- Very tall loads — check the door height as well as the type, since a dock door can be shorter than the trailer opening
- Long product — the constraint is often the internal column grid rather than the door
The question to ask is not "do you have loading doors". It is "how does my item come off the vehicle". Those get different answers.
The middle ground: a yard ramp
A portable yard ramp is a steel ramp that lets a wheeled machine drive out of a trailer down to ground level, or up into a dock. It is the standard workaround for a dock-only building, and it is a modest piece of equipment rather than a construction project.
Worth asking about specifically. A building that says it cannot take rolling stock may simply not own one, which is a different answer from cannot.
How our two buildings differ
Vancouver has 20 dock doors and 4 grade-level doors, so it takes both palletised freight and anything that needs to be driven in.
Calgary has 12 dock doors and no drive-in. Crated, skidded and palletised machinery loads through a Calgary dock without trouble; rolling stock goes to Vancouver. We would rather tell you that on the phone than have you discover it with a lowbed in the yard.
For reference — our Vancouver facility
- Facility size
- 200,000 sq ft
- Clear height
- 12 to 20 feet
- Loading
- 20 dock doors + 4 grade doors
- Sprinklers
- ESFR
- Racking
- Engineered racking installed
- Power
- 2,000 amp, 600 volt service
- Available footprints
- 1,000 to 25,000+ sq ft
- Warehouse floor team
- 12
- Security
- 24/7 CCTV and overnight security
- On-site climate
- Ambient and heated
- Chilled and frozen
- Rolls Right Cold Storage, Vancouver
- Highway access
- 4 minutes to the Trans-Canada
- Port access
- 14 minutes to GCT Vanterm
- Operating since
- 1976 (Coquitlam), Vancouver expansion following
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