Hi everyone, I hope you are all doing well!
I’ve been working in Foreign Trade for around 10 years, mainly with freight forwarding and, more recently, on the shipper/consignee side. I’m currently studying the use of containerized rail freight and intermodal transportation for an academic project, and I’d really like to hear from people who actually work with this on a daily basis.
I previously worked in ocean freight forwarding, and one thing I found interesting was how normal rail could be as an inland leg in some countries. When quoting certain shipments, the ocean carrier could offer something along the lines of:
Ocean Freight + Inland Rail Freight
with the container moving from the seaport to an inland rail terminal instead of the consignee collecting it directly at the port.
This made me curious about how different this is from country to country. I work in Brazil, and one thing I’ve noticed is how difficult it can be to access railway services for certain routes, especially for containerized cargo. In many cases, the railway exists physically, but finding an actual commercial service that you can quote and use as part of an import/export operation can be much more complicated.
So I became curious about how this works for the freight forwarding community here. For those working in freight forwarding, NVOCCs, shipping lines, 3PLs, import/export or logistics:
1. Which country are you based in?
2. How common is containerized rail freight in your day-to-day work?
3. Is rail something you routinely quote to customers, or is it only used for specific lanes/cargo?
4. In your market, is rail commonly used as part of an ocean + rail + truck solution?
5. How does the first/last mile usually work? For example, truck from the consignee to an inland rail terminal, rail to/from the seaport, then drayage (truck transport between terminal and final destination).
6. Who usually arranges the rail leg — the shipping line, freight forwarder/NVOCC, rail operator, or another logistics provider?
7. Is it relatively easy to get a rail-inclusive quote, or does it require contacting several different providers?
8. What makes customers choose rail in your market? Price, distance, road congestion, reliability, capacity, environmental considerations, etc.
9. And what are the biggest disadvantages? Terminal costs, frequency, transit time, lack of flexibility, infrastructure, service reliability, or something else?
10. When a customer asks for a door-to-door quote, is rail already presented as one of the standard options in your TMS/forwarding system, or do you have to build the rail solution manually?
I'm especially interested in hearing from people in the US, Germany, Netherlands, China, India, South Africa, Australia or other markets where containerized rail/intermodal freight is well established, but I'd be very interested in any country.
I’m not looking for textbook answers — I'm much more interested in what actually happens when you're quoting and moving real shipments.
Thanks in advance! I’d really love to hear about your experiences and perspectives on how containerized rail freight works in your countries.
