Regional parcel carrier Eastern Connection to fold after 36 years

Regional parcel carrier Eastern Connection is going out of business after 36 years.

In a brief and undated note on its website, Eastern Connection said that, effective April 11, it would no longer accept parcels from most of its customers. The company said it would wind down its operations after it completed deliveries of parcels that were already in its pipeline. It gave no estimate as to when it would close. Nor was there any explanation of the circumstances leading to its demise.

Eastern Connection, which focused on the Northeast U.S. business-to-business parcel market, was acquired in September 2015 by Dicom, a Montreal-based parcel and less-than-truckload (LTL) provider. Eastern Connection was co-founded in 1983 by James Berluti and Ted Kauffman, both of whom ran the company until it was sold. Prior to the Dicom deal, Eastern Connection was based in Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

Dicom had no announcement on its web site disclosing Eastern Connections’s impending closure

Eastern Connection operated out of a network of 19 terminals and cross-dock locations from Maine to Ohio, and south to Virginia. It was the only regional carrier guaranteeing overnight ground delivery within this 500-mile area.

Early in the decade, there had been rumors that Eastern Connection would become part of a national parcel network cobbled together from several providers in different regions. Nothing ever came to fruition, however.