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Intermodal transportation leverages the efficiencies of railroads over trucks on the long haul portion of a shipment. This reduces the fuel used, man power required and emissions produced while providing for lower costs for the shipper.
With an increasing importance placed on reducing carbon emissions and creating a green supply chain, intermodal is a great alternative to trucking being nearly 4 times more efficient than traditional over the road trucking. With the likely eventual implementation of some form of carbon taxation, intermodal’s market share will likely rise dramatically.
Intermodal also provides guaranteed capacity which creates a more reliable and diverse supply chain. Driver shortages are predicted to continually rise, with trucking rates likely to rise as well. Utilizing intermodal is a powerful tool to manage supply chain capacity and costs.
What is Intermodal?
Intermodal freight transportation is the use of a combination of typically rail and trucking services to move freight between origin and destination. Generally intermodal combines a short haul truck move (known as drayage) from the origin to a rail yard where the container is loaded onto a train, then another drayage move from the receiving rail terminal to the final destination.
Intermodal shipping represents the fastest growing segment of railroad revenue and capital investment. Port authorities and government entities are also investing massively into new intermodal terminals, inland ports and service capacity improvements due to the many public benefits with an increased utilization of intermodal transportation.
Intermodal Solutions
Add Intermodal to your Supply Chain
Shipping Intermodal
Shipping intermodal with Zmodal is incredibly easy through our intermodal logistics dashboard. Our door to door intermodal packages provide turn key conversion of volume from over the road service to intermodal, with a focus on service level, data analysis and cost efficiency.
Take a look at your supply chain and look at routes that are longer than 500 miles, the longer route, the greater the savings when compared to over the road trucking. Particularly routes from port cities to inland metropolitan areas will result in large savings. If you have routes that fit this criteria, contact us below and our team will analyze your shipping lanes for the best possible conversion opportunities.
Certain lanes for example the West coast to eastern or midwestern cities are prime candidates for significant supply chain efficiencies by leveraing intermodal transportation on these lanes. The most successful supply chains in the world utilize significant intermodal capacity on these lanes, and now smaller businesses can to with the same great service and easy access to the intermodal network by utilizing our Zmodal intermodal dashboard.
As with trucking, spot rates and contract are available depending upon shipment volume and lanes, however intermodal tends to be less volatile and feature higher levels of capacity even during peak seasons on core lanes.
With supply chain costs continually rising, intermodal is a powerful option to build more optimization and efficiency into your supply chain transportation plan. Particularly for small businesses, many have never considered or had easy access to trial intermodal on lanes that best fit their current routings.
Benefits of Intermodal
Zmodal provides door to door intermodal services that are cost effective with customers regularly saving 10-25% when converting full truckload shipments on routes over 500 miles while providing increased capacity and diversity within your supply chain. On long haul lanes intermodal can provide even greater cost savings while also avoiding the volatile trucking market as capacity tightens.
We work closely with shippers to analyze their supply chain and optimize lane pairings that could realize significant benefits by incorporating intermodal. Zmodal intermodal services are nearly indistinguishable from over the road trucking options from a service and on time reliability metric. Shippers routinely find that converting even a percentage of certain lanes’ volume to intermodal can bring great efficiency to a supply chain over time.
Our easy to use intermodal dashboard means you spend less time searching routes and rates, booking freight, tracking shipments, online billing and shipment analytics reporting. Additionally our services offer around the clock support and security. Zmodal is the easiest way to add intermodal to your supply chain mix with the customer service and experienced team to back it up. Zmodal is your intermodal partner, with a track record of successful conversions.
Intermodal Services
Zmodal offers comprehensive Supply Chain Solutions