Peak Season Forecast: Ocean, Intermodal, Air and Trucking

Special Report

COMMENTARY

By Larry Gross

During the coming trade dispute, transloading may fare better than IPI.

With intermodal staring down the barrel at huge— albeit possibly temporary— reductions in inbound TEUs on the US West Coast, it’ s looking pretty clear that the international intermodal sector is about to take a haircut. But what will the effect be on the domestic intermodal sector?

Transloading is an important component of the domestic intermodal market. Much of the volume moving off the West Coast in domestic containers is transloaded import cargo.

Southern California is the epicenter of transload activity. Gross Transportation Consulting( GTC) estimates that in the first quarter of 2025, approximately 70 % of import TEUs arriving in California moved out of the region via intermodal. Trucks handled the remainder, either for local consumption or long-haul dray to destinations such as Phoenix and Tucson.

About 57 % of the TEUs emerging from the Southwest on intermodal were transloads, with the remaining 43 % moving intact as inland point intermodal( IPI).

The first chart tracks the number of TEUs arriving each calendar quarter into California ports and GTC’ s estimates for the number of TEUs exiting via intermodal. This latter figure is then further divided into transload and IPI volumes. This chart clearly shows the relative stability of the transload activity as compared with both inbound TEUs and intact / IPI.

The second chart displays the same data in terms of intermodal’ s participation in import TEUs. At the beginning of 2023, arriving import TEUs reached their lowest point in recent history, but the percentage of those TEUs leaving via intermodal was relatively high. Since then, import TEUs arriving moved up, peaking in the second half of last year before retreating in the first quarter of 2025.

Outbound intermodal TEUs also increased, but not quite as quickly, resulting in a drop in the intermodal percentage. This was due entirely to a reduction in the percentage of TEUs coming out via transload. Note that the drop in the transload percentage does not mean that the transload volume went down, but rather that it remained relatively stable, with IPI handling most of the increase in import TEUs.

This relative stability may indicate that during the coming trade dispute, transloading may fare better than IPI. Undoubtedly, transload activity will drop, but perhaps not by as much as import TEUs or IPI shipments.

I estimate that transloads out of California represent over 15 % of all North American domestic intermodal activity. Transloading also takes place out of the Pacific Northwest, although to a lesser extent. Western Canadian

Roughly 70 % of import TEUs arriving in California moved out of the region by rail in Q1 2025. Chizhevskaya Ekaterina / Shutterstock. com

18 Journal of Commerce | June 2, 2025 www. joc. com