The rail boom has a trucking upside

What are you seeing happening right now? Are shipments shifting from road to rail?

There is a shift underway, but it is surgical, not broad, and length of haul is the key to reading it correctly. Currently, intermodal is the strongest of the three modes at mid-year. Looking at the most recent data, our Intermodal Volume Index hit 106.3 in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, up 11.5% year-over-year, and June was the sixth straight month of acceleration off a January trough that had been running 6% below the prior year. In level terms, that is 1.64 million moves.

I answer the road-to-rail question through the lanes where the two modes actually compete, which means the long haul. Over the past year, intermodal volume rose 11.5% while long-haul truckload was flat to slightly down, off about 1.5%. Short-haul and regional trucking grew roughly 5% over the same period.

So the story is not freight abandoning trucks for trains. It is freight migrating to intermodal on the 1,000-mile-plus lanes, where intermodal already carries 81% of its volume at an average haul near 1,400 miles.

The number I keep in front of me: the ratio of intermodal to long-haul truck moved from 13.5% to 15.3% over the year. Historically, this long-haul share hovers between 12-13% on average, so a jump to 15.3% is a sizeable gain for intermodal, but probably not a significant loss for trucking.

I will add one caution against over-reading June. That double-digit growth is flattered by a soft comparison month a year ago. The trend is genuine, but the rate of gain will look more modest once the easy comparisons roll off.

How did the recent spike in diesel prices impact whether shippers are selecting truck or rail?

Less than I think most people assume. When I run our modal-substitution model on more than a decade of monthly data, diesel by itself turns out to be a weak and short-lived lever on mode choice. The effect on intermodal share peaks about two months after a fuel shock and fades within a quarter, and it does not hold up as statistically durable. Even after I control for demand, there is no sustained share gain I can attribute to fuel alone. My intuition for why this moment feels different is more from labor-side constraints on truck capacity than from any real price response to diesel.

The reason is that people conflate the marginal decision with the structural one. Higher diesel tips a shipper toward rail only on a lane where intermodal already pencils out close, and only while the spread is fresh. It does not relocate freight on its own.

The spring run-up may be feeding some of the summer intermodal strength through that roughly two-month channel, but I would not let anyone characterize the current momentum as fuel-driven. Demand and service reliability are doing more of the work than the pump price.

How should small trucking carriers view intermodal strengthening—is it a threat to their business? Or an opportunity?

For most small carriers, I would frame it as an opportunity, and the reason is structural rather than optimistic: intermodal does not move a container without a truck on both ends. Every box that shifts to rail creates two drayage legs, one at origin and one at destination. Our Drayage Demand Index ran 78% above baseline in June, with app-based drayage activity roughly double a year earlier. That is demand flowing toward small carriers, not away from them. Carriers who contract as intermodal dray or transload partners turn intermodal growth into their own book of business rather than bidding against it.

The threat is real, but I want to be precise about who carries it. It falls on the carrier whose core business is single-driver, over-the-road dry van on dense, rail-competitive corridors, the Los Angeles-to-Chicago type lane that intermodal is purpose-built to win.

Reefer and specialized carriers are far less exposed to intermodal conversion, so those operators feel little of either the threat or the lift.

So the question I would put to a small carrier is not, "Am I threatened by intermodal?" It is, "Which side of intermodal am I on?" As the highway leg on a long rail-competitive lane, you feel pressure. As drayage, regional or a first-and-final-mile partner, you are in the fastest-growing part of the market and offer a diversified source of demand for your services.

What can small business motor carriers do to best position themselves in the current freight market?

I would give five moves, in order of leverage:

1. Follow the freight to the terminals. Build capacity around the intermodal ramps that are growing. Drayage is where intermodal strength converts most directly into small-carrier revenue.

2. Diversify length of haul. A book over-indexed to 1,000-mile-plus lanes is the book most exposed to intermodal. Balance it with regional and short-haul work, the segment currently growing about 5%.

3. Never fight the market: Partner rather than compete on the long lanes. On corridors where intermodal wins, the durable position is the highway leg of the intermodal move, not a head-to-head bid against it.

4. Treat fuel as a margin problem, not a demand signal. Diesel volatility is a cost to hedge through surcharges and routing discipline. As our analysis shows, it is not a reliable predictor of where freight goes, so do not restructure a fleet around it.

5. Contract capacity into the growing segments. Where demand is running hot, in drayage and regional, lock in committed volume rather than living on the spot market.

What's one prediction you have for the freight market in the near-term future?

Intermodal stays firm, but its growth rate cools. Our best forecast holds the Intermodal Volume Index above its 100 baseline through the back half of 2026, settling in the 101-to-103 range rather than extending June's spike.

In plain terms: intermodal remains the healthiest mode, but the double-digit year-over-year sprints give way to low-single-digit growth as the comparison base normalizes. The share intermodal has taken on long-haul lanes is structural, tied to service reliability and network fluidity, and I expect it to hold even as the growth rate settles.

For a small carrier, the practical read is that the drayage and regional opportunity outlasts the current volume surge. Watch the July and August readings and the path of diesel for confirmation, but the strategic signal is already in the data.