Intermodal
Freight that moves in one container or trailer across multiple transportation modes — most commonly truck to rail and back to truck — without the freight itself being rehandled.
How it works — and why it matters
A typical domestic intermodal move: a dray carrier picks up a container at the shipper, delivers it to a rail ramp, the railroad linehauls it hundreds or thousands of miles, and another dray carrier delivers it from the destination ramp to the receiver. The economics trade speed for cost — rail linehaul is cheaper per mile than truck, at the price of longer, less flexible transit.
Visibility is intermodal's classic weakness, because the move stitches together carriers and systems that don't naturally share data: two dray legs, a railroad, and often an intermodal marketing company in the middle. Normalizing status across those parties is exactly the kind of multi-system integration problem freight connectivity platforms exist to solve.