Intermodal Rail.
Highway Reach. Railroad Math.

Intermodal rail shipping moves freight in a single container that travels by more than one mode: a truck hauls it from your dock to the origin rail ramp, a train carries it across the long haul, and a second truck delivers it from the destination ramp to the door. The container is loaded and sealed once, and the freight inside is never re-handled between modes. On lanes over roughly 700 miles, intermodal typically prices 15 to 30 percent under over-the-road truckload while producing up to 75 percent fewer emissions.

Drayage is the short truck move at each end of an intermodal shipment: from your dock to the origin rail ramp, and from the destination ramp to the receiver. Dray carriers run specialized chassis that carry the container on the road. Drayage is usually the leg where intermodal moves go wrong, missed ramp cutoffs at origin and containers sitting on per-diem at destination, which is why AFX books and times both dray legs against the train schedule rather than treating them as separate truck moves.

On lanes over about 700 miles, intermodal typically prices 15 to 30 percent below comparable over-the-road truckload, and the gap widens with distance. The savings come from rail physics: a train moves a ton of freight close to 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel, three to four times the efficiency of a truck. The exact number on your lane depends on dray length at each end, current rail and truck markets, and volume, so we quote both modes side by side and show you the spread.

Plan on one to two extra days versus solo over-the-road truckload. Los Angeles to Chicago runs about 4 to 5 days door to door against roughly 3 by truck. The difference comes from ramp cutoffs and grounding schedules, not from slow trains, which cruise the long haul around the clock without driver hours-of-service limits. If your lane has a day of schedule flexibility, the trade is usually a clear win.

Under roughly 700 miles, when delivery is time-definite to the day or hour, when either end of the lane sits far from a rail ramp so drayage eats the savings, or when the freight needs special handling a sealed container cannot give it. We price both modes on every long-haul quote and tell you straight when the highway wins. About a third of the lanes we analyze are better off on a truck, and we say so.

No. The container is loaded and sealed at your dock and opened at the receiver. At each ramp, a lift moves the entire container between chassis and railcar, so the freight inside never gets touched, restacked, or cross-docked. For damage-sensitive freight, that sealed ride is one of intermodal’s quiet advantages over any mode that re-handles product mid-route.

Up to about 43,500 pounds of cargo in a standard 53-ft domestic container, with roughly 3,900 cubic feet of space and up to 26 standard pallet positions. Road weight limits on the dray legs are usually the binding constraint, since the container and chassis are heavier than a dry van, so very dense freight may load slightly lighter than it would in a van. Your specialist confirms legal payload on your exact lane.

COFC, container on flatcar, moves a container that double-stacks two-high on the railcar, and it is how nearly all modern domestic intermodal runs because stacking doubles the train’s capacity. TOFC, trailer on flatcar, called piggyback, puts a complete highway trailer with its wheels on the railcar. AFX quotes domestic intermodal as 53-ft COFC by default, the most cost-efficient configuration on the network.

Door-to-door intermodal includes both dray legs: we bring the container to your dock, run the rail line-haul, and deliver to the receiver, one rate and one point of contact. Ramp-to-ramp covers only the rail portion, and you arrange your own drayage at each end. Most shippers want door-to-door, and it is how AFX quotes by default, with ramp-to-ramp available for shippers who run their own dray fleets.

Two feeds, stitched into one timeline. The railroads report milestone events: ingate, railcar loading, departure, interchange, arrival, grounding, and outgate. GPS adds container position on the dray legs and across the line-haul. AFX streams both into a single tracking view in your account, with a specialist watching exceptions, so an intermodal load is as visible as a truckload with us.

After a container grounds at the destination ramp, the railroad allows a window of free time, typically 24 to 48 hours depending on the ramp. Storage accrues if the box sits past free time, and per-diem accrues on the container itself once it leaves the ramp until it is returned empty. The fix is scheduling, not luck: AFX books destination dray before the train arrives and runs a free-time clock on every container, so charges that surprise shippers elsewhere simply do not show up on our invoices.

Yes, by a wide margin, and it is measurable. Freight rail moves one ton nearly 500 miles per gallon of fuel, so shifting a long-haul load from road to rail cuts its emissions by up to 75 percent. On a single Los Angeles to Chicago container that is roughly six metric tons of CO2 avoided, and a steady lane converts into a sustainability number your operations team can actually report. Many AFX shippers move lanes to intermodal for the carbon math alone.