Raod / Rail Transloading

Transloading concerns the transshipment of loads from truck to rail and vice-versa. It is done to exploit the respective advantages of trucking and rail, namely avoid long distance trucking. A producer relying on long distance trucking to service a set of customers is facing many difficulties (A). The most significant one is the likeliness of empty travel for return trips in addition to the requirement of having a large fleet of trucks to insure a service frequency. By relying on transloading (B) the producer ship its freight to a nearby rail terminal where truckloads are transshipped into trainloads. The larger loads are then shipped to a rail terminal in proximity (150-200 miles; 250-300 km) of a group of customers. Shipments are then broken down in LTL batches bound to specific customers. Doing so often requires a smaller fleet of trucks as shorter distances could permit the same truck to do several journeys per day. The efficiency of the system mainly relies on the efficiency of rail terminals to accommodate its time requirements. 600 miles (1,000 km) is the minimal distance for transloading to be cost effective. A vast array of value added activities has also emerged at transloading facilities depending of the type of commodities, such as as storage, blending, packaging, consolidated invoicing, combined product shipments, bar-coding and labeling.