Truck to the ramp. Rail for the miles. Truck to the door.
The freight never changes vehicles — only the container does. That single idea is why 90% of major shippers use intermodal in some form.
Booked like a truckload, priced like a train: one pickup, one delivery, one invoice — and the long-haul miles ride the cheapest, cleanest mode on land.
Intermodal freight is the movement of a single sealed container across rail and truck without ever handling the freight inside — a truck takes it to the rail ramp, a train carries it for the long haul, and a truck delivers it to the door.In practice that means a 53' domestic container is loaded and sealed at your dock, drayed by a local driver to the origin ramp, lifted onto a Class-1 doublestack flatcar — COFC, container on flatcar— run 500–2,500 miles by rail, offloaded at the destination ramp, and drayed to the receiver. Three legs, one box, one rate. The cargo is touched exactly twice: when your team loads it and when the consignee opens the seal.
The economics come from the middle leg. Steel wheel on steel rail moves a ton of freight roughly four times as far per gallon as a truck, and a doublestack well car carries two containers in every train slot — so the rail line-haul prices dramatically below the same miles on the highway. The overhead comes from the ends: every intermodal move pays for two local drays. On short lanes that overhead wins; past roughly 750 miles the line-haul savings overtake it, and the result is freight that runs 15–25% cheaper than FTL with 60–65% lower CO₂ per ton-mile — a number documented by EPA SmartWay, not invented by a sales deck. Qeep books the whole move across all six North American Class-1 railroads, with the dray desk and the rail desk under one roof.
How door-to-door intermodal works
You book it like a truckload — origin dock, destination dock, pickup date — and we run the three legs behind one rate. The origin draydelivers your loaded container to the ramp ahead of the train’s cut-off, typically 24–48 hours before departure. The rail line-haulruns on the railroad’s schedule with tracking flowing from railroad EDI into your account. The destination drayout-gates the box inside ramp free time and delivers to the door, and a single invoice covers all three legs. Door-to-door transit is FTL plus 1–2 days: LA–Chicago runs about 4–5 days against 3 by truck.
When intermodal beats FTL
Four conditions, and most long-haul freight meets all of them: the lane runs 750+ miles between major metros (where ramps are dense and drays are short); the freight is dense and palletized — rail loves weight; the schedule can absorb 1–2 extra days; and either the budget or the sustainability report benefits from the conversion. It’s also the proven hedge when the truckload market tightens — intermodal capacity and pricing hold steady while spot rates spike, which is why 90% of major shippers keep rail in the mix.
Is the freight handled? (No — sealed container)
The most common misconception is that rail means cross-docking. It doesn’t: the container is what gets handled, never the freight inside it. The box is sealed at your dock and opened at the receiver’s — the lifts at the ramps move the steel, not the pallets. Because containers are stacked and lifted, the ride is slightly rougher than a trailer that’s loaded once and opened once, which is why intermodal damage rates run marginally above FTL and why blocking and bracing standards are part of every booking. Properly palletized freight rides doublestack every day without incident; genuinely fragile cargo belongs on FTL, and we’ll route it there.
