Hoffman Equipment

In 1920 Bill and Harry Hoffman purchased their first truck and founded Hoffman Motor Transportation to deliver roofing material for installers. The trucking company expanded steadily over the next thirty years by specializing in heavy hauling and rigging, moving oversized objects, such as large machinery, structural steel, storage tanks, industrial boilers, and even diners.

Hoffman acquired its first crane in the early ’40s, and this led to a dramatic new direction for the company; so much so that in 1949, Hoffman Rigging & Crane Service, Inc. was established as a complement to the transportation business. This side of the business grew quickly, eclipsing the transportation side and growing into a crane rental business that included a fleet of 75 cranes —crawler and truck mounted, lattice boom and hydraulic—with lifting capacities ranging from 15 to 300 tons.

During the ’60s and ’70s, Hoffman focused and became heavily involved in rigging services needed for constructing nuclear power plants. At the same time, the Company was one of the pioneers in freight containerization – our fleet of 10 P&H 300t truck cranes loaded every container coming or going from NY harbor until the advent of the permanent dockside gantry crane.

As the nuclear power industry faded and the container loading business wound down, in 1978 Hoffman purchased an equipment distributor in Piscataway, NJ and moved headquarters there. From this base, Hoffman not only sold equipment into NY and NJ, but also found opportunities to supply US built equipment around the world, successfully supplying huge jobs in Russia, Iran, Colombia, Venezuela and Honduras to name just a few.