Surface Transportation

Trucking | Rail | Intermodal | Air & Expedited | Distribution

Rail prices rising ahead of 2027 contract talks By Ari Ashe

Railroads and domestic intermodal providers are ready to raise contract rates in the 2027 bid cycle. But for many shippers, costs are already up as a wave of truck-to-rail conversions lets intermodal providers choose their loads.

That reflects a blunt reality of freight: the contract is only a starting point. Agreements between shippers and carriers set rates and service expectations, but they generally do not require shippers to tender specific volumes or carriers to accept every load, in either truckload or intermodal.

As asset-based intermodal marketing companies( IMCs) reject lower-priced freight, shippers are pushed deeper into routing guides and end up paying more well before the next round of contracts take effect.

A shipper, for example, may have awarded the top spot in a routing guide this January to an asset-based IMC at $ 2,000, with another IMC at $ 2,100 and a third at $ 2,400. But if the first two providers decline the load, the shipper must move down the guide to secure capacity.

Gary Ahlstrom, vice president of pricing at STG Logistics, said his company is hauling more freight as a result.

“ We’ re being asked to do 50 % more in some cases because freight is getting turned back by others,” Ahlstrom said during a Journal of Commerce webcast in early June.

John Knight, VP of intermodal operations at Watco Supply Chain Services, said the same pattern is showing up in bids where his company was not the lowest-cost option.

“ We’ re seeing several of the [ bids ] that we ended up third or fourth on the list now coming back to us and asking us for coverage,” Knight said during the webinar.“ Some routing guides have been bent, for others they’ ve been fractured.”

Even those secondary and tertiary providers can raise rates as larger asset-based IMCs turn away more freight. So, while shippers may still hold attractive contract rates on paper, their actual intermodal costs have climbed over the past three months.

Schneider National CEO Jim Filter said that the imbalance cuts both ways.

“[ Shippers ] don’ t have to guarantee that they’ re going to have the freight for us, and we don’ t have to promise that we’ re going to have a driver available,” Filter told the Wells Fargo Industrials & Materials Conference on June 9.“ There is an opportunity here of what freight we’ re actually accepting... there’ s also opportunity within the spot market to be able to capture price.”

Even so, shippers may still enjoy significant savings until the next bid cycle resets pricing more broadly, especially because the current recovery appears to be supply-driven rather than demand-led, unlike the surge during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rising intermodal demand exposes weak supply chain link: drayage

Drayage capacity shortages could result in delivery delays of 16 to 24 hours in affected markets. Henry C Jorgenson / Shutterstock. com

By Ari Ashe

With cost-conscious shippers shifting freight from truckload to intermodal due to the war with Iran, rail service has remained reliable. Now the strain is in the final-mile drayage move from the ramp to the customer.

The speed of the truckload-to-intermodal shift caught drayage fleets flat-footed. After a mild peak last year and tepid winter demand, war-driven diesel prices soared and pushed more freight off the highway and onto the rails in March and April, leaving some markets short of drivers just as volume accelerated.

“ I’ ve certainly felt that capacity crunch, which has slowly ramped up as recruiting drivers for intermodal has been more difficult throughout this year,” Bill Dietrich, senior VP of intermodal at J. B. Hunt Transport Services, said during the Wells Fargo Industrials Conference June 9.

Craig Ingram, CEO of Asset-Based Intermodal, a drayage provider in Dallas, said the change was sudden and sharp.“ Whereas I was begging for freight for the next day at the beginning of the year, I am now booked out two to three days in advance. Every one of our drivers is accounted for,” Ingram told the Journal of Commerce.“ I can’ t even tell you the amount of freight we’ re turning down right now simply because I don’ t have enough drivers to handle it all. Customers we haven’ t heard from in years are coming back to us.” But the“ capacity crunch” is not limited to Dallas.“ Chicago is extremely tight on trucks, so is [ northern ] New Jersey,” said Gary Ahlstrom, director of pricing at asset-based intermodal provider STG Logistics.

40 Journal of Commerce | July 6, 2026 www. joc. com