Surface Transportation
“ I would say most of our bids come out in September and October and have effective dates of Jan. 1, and that’ s where I think we’ re really going to see the big increase year over year,” Ahlstrom said.
He said markets with too few drayage drivers, including Chicago, Dallas and northern New Jersey, are likely to see the biggest contract increases, although volume growth and intermodal savings are strongest for now in these eastern US hubs.
Domestic Southwest – Midwest intermodal volume rose 1.3 % year over year in the first four months of 2026, according to the Intermodal Association of North America( IANA), while Midwest – Southwest volume fell 0.3 %. That corridor includes major lanes such as Los Angeles to Chicago.
Intermodal shippers saved 56 cents per mile on short hauls in April compared with truckload, up from 8 cents in 2025. Walter Cicchetti / Shutterstock. com
By contrast, domestic Midwest – Southeast container volume, including lanes such as Chicago to Harrisburg( Pennsylvania) or northern New Jersey, rose 11.3 % during the same period, according to IANA. Southeast – Northeast traffic, including lanes such as Harrisburg to Atlanta, increased 11.2 %. And while the longest transcontinental hauls still produce the largest raw dollar savings, the largest improvement on a per-mile basis is in the eastern US, where shippers saved an average of 56 cents per mile in April on hauls shorter than 600 miles, according to the Journal of Commerce Intermodal Savings Index, compared with 8 cents in April 2025.
For transcontinental hauls of more than 2,000 miles, shippers saved 71 cents per mile on average in April, versus 62 cents a year earlier.
J. B. Hunt sees this opportunity in the East, where it says intermodal volume grew 8 % year over year in the first quarter, while transcontinental volume in the West Coast was flat.
“ That’ s where most of the freight intermodal lost to the highway, in the past, is now being converted back,” Spencer Frazier, Hunt’ s executive vice president of sales and marketing, said.“ It also matches up with our customers’ supply chain strategies. They’ ve gone multi-port and regional in distribution because they’ re trying to get closer to their customers.”
Shorter eastern hauls narrow the transit-time penalty for choosing rail over truck. In dense lanes missing a train may delay a container by only hours. On transcontinental routes out of Los Angeles, missing a train often means losing at least a day.
email: ari. ashe @ spglobal. com
“ The question is how long it will take to get drivers back in the market. I think it could be six months.”
For shippers, the lack of capacity could translate into delivery delays of 16 to 24 hours compared with six months ago in affected markets.
Comments about the deteriorating performance on the final-mile leg have appeared in the biannual Journal of Commerce Intermodal Service Scorecard survey, currently open to all intermodal shippers.
“ J. B. Hunt’ s on-time performance has deteriorated significantly from 93 % to under 80 %,” wrote one of the anonymous shipper respondents.
A second shipper said Hub Group had the“ worst on-time deliveries in our group,” with substantial missed or rescheduled appointments this year. Hub Group has struggled to pay some third-party truckload and dray drivers since the February disclosure of an accounting error that ultimately led to the removal of its CFO and COO.
Intermodal rail service metrics like train speeds and idled railcars, meanwhile, are holding up well.
Train speeds among US Class I railroads averaged 29.3 mph in the four weeks ended June 10, down from 29.4 mph in the same period last year and 30.1 mph in 2024, according to the US Surface Transportation Board( STB).
A total of 788 intermodal railcars sat idle for more than 48 hours in the week ended June 10, up from 511 in the same week in 2025 but down from 980 in 2024 and well below the long-term average of 1,011 since 2017, excluding the pandemic-related service disruptions in 2020 – 22.
That’ s a sign that railroads are better positioned to handle higher volumes than drayage providers heading into the intermodal peak season, which typically begins in the third quarter but could come earlier this year due to an early import surge.
email: ari. ashe @ spglobal. com
Intermodal train speeds stable despite rising volumes
Rolling li four-week average of US Class I intermodal train speeds, in miles per hour
32
31
30.0 30 30
29
28 |
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Week 1 |
Week 11 |
Week 21 |
L |
Week 31 |
Week 41 |
Week
Week 52 51
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L
Source: US Surface Transportation Board
2024 2025 2026
© 2026 S & P Global
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