Planning the truck pack for a touring production

A touring production is designed to a truck count. The designer draws a show, the production manager works out what it takes to move it, and somewhere in that conversation a number gets fixed — four trucks, six, eleven. Tour Manager Info describes the job as reverse-engineering “a show that is tourable, but one that also fits within the parameters of available transportation and budget”. A mid-sized arena act runs somewhere between four and twenty trucks; a stadium production can exceed ninety.

That number is the expensive decision on this page, because a truck is a line in the tour budget for the whole run rather than a cost per journey. And the pack is how you find out whether the number is true.

What happens after that is inheritance. The trade’s own advice is that once the pack is settled you print a laminated schematic of it and “call the same pack, night after night to create consistency”. So there are really two decisions here, they happen months apart, and they pull in opposite directions.

Two decisions, two different moments

Before the tour, fewer trucks is the whole game. One vendor selling load planning into this niche claims tours running five semis often drop to three or four, at around $10,000 a week per truck removed. Treat the figure as a vendor’s figure. The direction is not in doubt: a truck you do not take is a truck you are not paying for across the entire run, along with its driver, its diesel and its parking.

Once the trucks are booked, the arithmetic inverts. The fifth truck is now a sunk cost and the nightly variable is crew time and mistakes.

Honestly, at 1 a.m., I would often take the deliberately under-filled truck. That might sound strange coming from someone who builds load-planning software, because everyone assumes the objective must be to squeeze the maximum possible utilisation out of every vehicle. But a touring operation has a cost to complexity. An identical pack means the crew knows where things go. People can work without constantly asking questions. The same cases come out in the same order. The driver and the venue crew are dealing with something familiar. And when you are coordinating tired people — sometimes a mixture of experienced crew and people who have never seen the equipment before — familiarity has a real operational value. A load that saves 5% of trailer space but takes an extra 40 minutes to explain and rebuild every night can be the more expensive solution.

Those two positions are not in conflict, they are in sequence. Squeeze in pre-production, while a truck is still a decision. Freeze during the run, when it is not. The mistake is doing them the wrong way round: optimising the pack in week six, when the trucks are already paid for and the only thing left to lose is the crew’s night.

Prove it fits before the steel is built

The established way to test a pack costs nothing and works: tape out the truck’s footprint on the floor of the rehearsal room and push real road cases around inside it. You can also ask vendors for sample trailer packs showing how their gear packs into a truck, which gives you a ballpark for how much space each department will take before anything is built. Productions with a complicated load-out sometimes go further and schedule a strike rehearsal, on the reasoning that a crew who has packed the show once in a calm room packs it faster and more carefully under deadline.

What planning software adds is that you can do it before the cases exist, and repeat it every time the design changes. Model the trailer once, enter the case list, and you have an answer while the design is still an argument rather than a fabrication order.

The question is rarely “does it fit”. It is “what does it cost to make it fit”, and that is a comparison between options: a fifth truck for the run, a redesign of two carts, or a taller trailer. Give each container type a fixed container cost when you select equipment and the solver has something to minimise other than air; where the trade-off is more complicated than a flat cost per truck, the cost function lets you write what you actually care about. That is an advanced feature and worth a conversation with us before you rely on it.

One honest limit, and it comes from the same trade source that recommends the software: “what works in a 3D model might not end up being the best solution once you end up out on the road.” Use the model to narrow the options and to kill the ones that were never going to work. Let the rehearsal room settle which of the survivors the crew can actually execute.

The trailer is not a box

A pack that fits a rectangle and not the trailer is worse than no pack, because you find out on the dock.

• Wheel wells. North American trailers have internal wheel wells intruding into the load space; European trailers do not, but carry less overall. Model them once with the Components tab — a Custom part, or a Frame preset anchored to the floor and a side — and every plan afterwards packs around them instead of through them.
• The trailer you actually get. Interior dimensions vary by builder and build spec, which matters when a few centimetres decide whether two dollies sit side by side. Our 53-foot trailer dimensions reference has the standard figures; the carrier’s spec sheet has yours. European touring fleets lean on high-cube mega trailers precisely because the internal height is what lets you double-stack cases, so build the equipment from the real height rather than the nominal one.
• Weight, and where it sits. Trucks handle best with the heaviest section nearest the driver and the load reasonably even side to side. Set the axle weights and legal limits on the equipment so the plan is checked against real axle groups, cap how far the loaded centre of gravity may drift with the centre of gravity limit, and use Must be loaded along centerline for the heavy racks where left-right balance is the constraint.
• Bus trailers are a different problem. A band trailer behind a bus caps out around 10,000 lb, and weight, not volume, is what stops you.
• Space that is not for cargo. Merchandise usually arrives last and wants a reserved area — the trade solution is an attic over the pack on load bars and plywood. Empty trailers are also where dead cases live during the show. Neither is cargo you are planning, and both are space you cannot plan into.

What actually repeats, and what does not

Before choosing where to store anything, separate three things that get muddled together on a tour:

• The kit. The cases, lighting, sound equipment, staging and cables that come back again and again. Mostly stable for the run, and often for the next run too — with a tail of items that get repaired, swapped, borrowed or added for three shows. How long that tail is, I do not know, and I would be sceptical of anyone offering you a percentage. Treat the kit as stable and the tail as exceptions, not the other way round.
• The loading knowledge. Stacking rules, segregation, equipment choices, allowed overhang, loading preferences — how you load, rather than what you load. Also stable, and much less likely to be written down anywhere.
• The leg. One date, one venue, and whatever is different about it: a case added, a case dropped, a support act’s backline riding along for three shows.

Two things about the kit make the whole approach work, and both are decisions taken before the tour rather than during it. Standardising case sizes simplifies the pack and removes the awkward stacking that eats space in the corners. And putting everything on wheels — carts, dollies, pre-rig truss with the fixtures already mounted — means the thing you are planning is the dolly footprint, not the case. Model those as secondary equipment so the plan reflects what actually rolls up the ramp.

Choose the unit of reuse

Cargo-Planner gives you three mechanisms, and they map onto the three lifespans above almost exactly.

The cargo library is where the kit itself belongs. Each case is entered once with its real dimensions, weight and stacking behaviour, and from then on you pull it into a load list by typing its name or SKU in the input table, or import a batch of library items at once. Nobody re-types a trunk’s dimensions on leg twelve, and nobody gets them slightly wrong.

That list has a second use worth knowing about. An international tour needs a manifest anyway, and a tour crossing a customs border on an ATA carnet needs every item itemised with weight and value — cables and cases included, which is routinely described as the most tedious admin on a tour. Cargo-Planner is not a carnet tool and will not file one for you. But the weights and dimensions the carnet asks for are the same numbers the pack needs, and keeping one measured list rather than three approximate ones is most of that job.

The load preset is where the loading knowledge belongs: the settings and the equipment selection that should survive from one leg to the next. Presets are shared within the company rather than owned by whoever built them, so the pack belongs to the tour, not to one planner’s browser.

Duplicating the previous leg’s load list is the third option, and it has a legitimate use: the temporary specifics of a particular leg, when the shipment is genuinely similar to the one before it.

What it should not be is the standing method. The failure with standardising on duplication is that yesterday’s exceptions quietly become today’s rules. Somebody added an extra case, moved a piece of equipment, changed the loading order to solve a one-off problem — and now every new plan inherits it. After ten legs, nobody is quite sure which settings are deliberate and which are historical accidents.

That is something I have seen outside of software as well. Touring crews are incredibly good at developing practical shortcuts, but shortcuts become dangerous when nobody remembers why the shortcut was created.

So: library for what you have, preset for how you normally work, and duplication for the temporary specifics of a particular leg.

What belongs in the preset, and what does not

There is no threshold to calculate here, no number of legs after which freezing the pack pays back. A preset can be created from a load plan that already works — tick Create from current load plan in the create dialog and the settings you have just proved on the floor become the starting point for every plan after it. That was a deliberate shortcut on our side, for exactly this case. The first good load-out is the setup cost.

What does take a few passes is working out what should be in there. The key is learning what is variable and what is constant for the loading, and that distinction is not obvious on leg one.

A preset holds:

• Equipment — which trailers are available in the plan, not just how many were used last time.
• Secondary equipment — the pallets, frames, dollies and truss carts that cases preload onto.
• Settings — loading style, the segregation table, and custom rules.

A worked example of the distinction. Do you have complicated stacking rules for lighting and sound cases, with allowed overhang limits? Write that as a custom rule and store it in the preset, because it is true on every leg. Are the pyro-technics not being used at the next stop? You might want to segregate them into their own vehicle that can completely sit out the next stop — and that is not a preset. That is this leg. Do it with a Class and the segregation table, or by restricting those items to a named piece of equipment on this list only.

The useful part is that the two compose. Even the temporarily segregated pyro cases still arrive knowing the stacking rule, because the rule travels with the preset rather than with the load list it was invented on.

One constraint worth knowing before you build: presets are specific to a load list type, so a road tour’s preset is a road preset and does not carry across to a sea or air list.

The first truck is a mixed truck

It is tempting to give each department a trailer and be done. That is broadly what happens — one first-hand account of a touring load-in has audio, electrics, carpentry, props, wardrobe and hair each unloading their own truck — but it is not what happens to the first truck, and the first truck is the one that decides how the morning goes.

In that account the first truck is deliberately mixed. It carries carpentry’s drops and motors so the riggers can get points in the roof, because everything else hangs off them; it carries the truss and the audio towers that go up as soon as there are points to hang them from; and it carries the front-of-house cable runs, the longest and most complicated job, which the whole local crew starts on first. The on-site order in a video-department account runs the same way: the rigging team attaches motors to their points, and shortly after that audio flies the PA, video hangs the LED wall, and lighting positions its truss. A greenfield build stretches the same shape over days — deck and power, then structure, rigging and the sound system, then lighting grid, backline and video.

I am describing that shape rather than prescribing it, because every production orders it differently and none of us here has called a load-in. What is consistent across the accounts is the principle: rigging and power go first because everything depends on them, and the first trailer is not a department’s trailer but the one that unblocks every department at once.

That first truck is also the hard planning problem, and the one worth doing in software rather than on a whiteboard: pulling the first-needed items out of six departments into one trailer, without breaking any department’s own pack. Give it a Group / Consignment ID of its own, give each department another, and the Shipments / Groups settings do the rest — whether groups may share a trailer, whether they must sit together with nothing in between, and whether a group travels whole or not at all. Those belong in the preset with everything else that is true every night.

The pay-off is that trucks acquire an identity. Truck 3 should be truck 3 in every city, because crews learn vehicles, not vehicle numbers on a screen, and a pack whose contents migrate between trailers between legs is not a pack. Normally the travelling crew has assistance from local people, and that is exactly why it matters: you are directing a gang who have never seen this equipment. A stable truck identity is what lets you tell someone “everything for the stage-left wing is on truck 3” and have it be true in the next city.

Fix the sequence once, as part of the pack

The order the pack loads in is not a detail of the pack, it is most of its value. One video-department guide puts it flatly: one of the biggest markers of a good truck pack is the order in which the truck has been packed, and on a tour that order is simply how it comes off the truck at the next load-in.

One mechanical fact does most of the work. Items loaded first sit deepest and come off last, so the thing that builds first is the thing that loads last. Sequencing the pack is sequencing the unload, backwards.

The direct tool is Priority on the cargo — a higher priority loads before a lower one. For anything more specific there are custom rules: Must be loaded first, Must be loaded before for a pairwise constraint between two departments, and Order by to sort loading by any cargo property — including whatever column you use to name the phase or the department.

Group by is the rule to know about if reachability is the real issue rather than order. It keeps items with the same property value together, and its reach length, reach to back of cargo and access width settings describe what the crew can physically get to — a forklift needs a wider corridor than two people carrying a case. Turning strict loading on finishes one group before starting the next, which costs space and buys you a department that comes off in one piece.

Planning with priority and a sequenced load and unload gives the crew an honest chance to work at its best. It will not survive contact with the tour intact — shortcuts get invented on the fly, and over forty dates the crew works out its own faster way to load and unload. That is not the plan failing, and the trade advice says the same thing about the model in gentler words. From what I saw as support crew on stage builds, that learning is one of the largest efficiency gains on a tour, and it happens whether or not anybody planned for it. What the plan is for is the first legs, the new people, and the nights when nobody is in a state to improvise well. And when the crew’s version turns out to be better, that is the moment to put it back into the preset, rather than leave it as folklore that walks out of the door with whoever worked it out.

Run the tour as a project with dated legs

The pack belongs to the tour. The calendar it runs against does not, and a project is where the tour lives as one object rather than forty unrelated load lists.

Set a default list type and a default preset on the project, and every list created inside it starts with the pack already applied — or attach the preset to the project rather than remembering to apply it each time. Then use recurring shipments to give the project a calendar of dated legs: each show date is an occurrence you open from the calendar, and inside a leg you move between dates with the back and forward arrows.

If every leg needs the same metadata — leg number, venue, promoter reference — configure it once as a company-level custom field so it appears on the creation form for every load list, instead of living in the load list’s name.

Absorbing the leg that breaks the standard

Some legs are different. A case is added for three shows. One venue’s dock takes a shorter trailer. The support act’s backline joins in Lyon and leaves in Turin.

The point of everything above is that these become edits rather than rebuilds:

• Cargo that moves between dates does not need re-entering. Select the rows, right-click and choose Move to loadlist…, then pick the date from the project calendar. That is the same mechanism whether a case arrives late or leaves early.
• A one-off arrangement change can be made by hand after calculating, in the planner view, rather than by changing settings that then apply to every remaining leg.
• A genuinely different leg — the smaller dock, the fly date, the festival slot with a shared truck — is the case for duplicating the previous list and editing it. It is also the case where you should be most careful, because it is the exact moment yesterday’s exception starts becoming tomorrow’s rule.

The discipline that keeps this working is a one-way rule: a change goes into the preset only if you expect it to be true next week as well. Anything else stays on the leg. When you cannot say which of the two a change is, that is the signal to rebuild the preset deliberately from a load plan that currently works, rather than to keep patching.

And there is an honest limit. When the kit itself changes — a new production, a different rig, a support package that stays for the rest of the run — re-planning from scratch is the right answer, and the preset should be rebuilt to match rather than amended around. You are back at the top of this page, deciding a truck count against a design. Standardisation is worth having because the show repeats; when the show stops repeating, so does the argument for it.

When something breaks and the show still goes on

The case that actually costs money is the one nobody planned: a console dies, a motor fails, and the replacement has to be in the next city by the time doors open. Somebody is on the phone getting a quote at short notice, on a rate that is not the tour’s rate.

Two parts of that are load planning rather than freight buying. The first is the measurements: a quote is priced on dimensions and weight, and “about a metre and a bit” is not a basis for one. If the kit is in the library, the real figures are already there and the request goes out with numbers somebody has checked. The second is where the replacement then sits — add it to the leg it arrives on and use Move to loadlist… for the dates it rides along, so the department it belongs to and the truck it lives on are decided once instead of argued about at every remaining load-out.

Where it flies rather than trucks, a quick air load list answers the question the forwarder asks next: whether it goes as it is, or has to come out of its road case to make the aircraft. Cargo-Planner does not quote or book freight. What it removes is the guessing about the numbers you give to the person who does.

What the crew gets at every venue

The pack is only worth what arrives at the dock, and the trade’s answer to that is a laminated schematic of the pack that the crew and the hands can look at, so the same pack gets called every night. That is the artefact to aim at.

Build one load plan layout and set it as the default so every leg produces identical paperwork. Include the loading instructions block, which gives step-by-step instructions by layers, by stacks or by a custom property — the department column, if you have made one — and can show the secondary equipment cases are preloaded onto. Where legs differ in a way the document must reflect, visibility conditions let blocks appear or hide per plan, so one layout covers the variations instead of spawning a second layout that then drifts.

Crews also colour-code cases by where they are going in the building rather than by what is in them — one account runs yellow for spares, pink for front of house, purple for the pit, green for amp racks. If you keep that colour as a property on the cargo, the same word can drive the grouping in the plan and the sort order on the printed instructions, which is one less thing that can disagree with itself at 1 a.m.

Then get it to people: share the plan as a read-only link with the carrier or the venue rather than emailing a fresh PDF every leg, and export to PDF or Excel for the crews who want paper on the dock.