Intermodal Marketers Lean More to Trains

Intermodal marketing companies, middleman firms that arrange either all-highway or combined rail-truck shipments for clients such as factories or retail stores, used trains for a greater share of their load mix in the summer than they did last spring.

The Intermodal Association of North America, in its review of third-quarter industry performance, said IMCs booked combination intermodal shipments for 61.8 percent of the loads they handled in the July-September period, up a full point from the April-June quarter.

That means they arranged truck-only deliveries for 38.2 percent of the shipments they booked, down from 39.2 percent in the spring quarter.

IMCs tracked by IANA arranged 411,927 loads in the third quarter, down 5.6 percent from the 2008 period but up 1.7 percent from this year’s second quarter. They generated about 13.8 percent of the total 3 million intermodal shipments by all firms in the third quarter.

The IMCs’ intermodal loadings rose to 254,700 from 246,194 three months earlier, while truck-only moves fell to 157,227 from 158,996 in the April-June period.
Industry officials have said truckload rates remained weak even with the economy growing again because of a large overhang of underused truck capacity, which has weighed on intermodal pricing as well. However, railroads this year are also moving trains faster and loads face less time waiting at terminals, which increases the value of their intermodal service.

In line with those trends, IMCs saw their average revenue per intermodal box rise 8.5 percent in the third quarter from three months earlier to $2,309, while the average for highway moves rose just 0.7 percent to $1,179.

Contact John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com.