Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- Before peak bookings, model your top five inland lanes at both a solo truck rate and an all-in intermodal rate with dray on both ends, and find the crossover point in trailers per week where rail actually wins.
- Lock intermodal capacity now for the peak window on any lane where you reliably move more than 20 trailers a month, rather than chasing space in September.
- Price the dray, not just the rail haul, because that is where a cheap intermodal plan usually turns expensive; hold your dray carrier to a quoted per-move rate through the peak months.
- Keep ten to fifteen percent of each lane on solo truck through peak, so a rail delay or a chassis shortage does not leave you with no second route.
- Track long-haul truck capacity, not the index, as your signal, and review spot truck rates on your lanes every two weeks until the peak ends.
The Intermodal Association of North America released its July reading of 106.8 on 7 July, down slightly from 107.7 in June but still the second-highest of the year against a 2017-19 baseline of 100. IANA attributed the strength to domestic-led growth, steady demand and tight long-haul truck capacity heading into peak season.
The Analysis
The Intermodal Association of North America put its July volume index at 106.8, a touch under June's 107.7 but still the second-highest reading of 2026 against a 2017-19 baseline set to 100. IANA credited the strength to domestic-led growth, steady demand, and long-haul truck capacity that is already tight going into peak season.
Numbers like this one get read badly, because they look like a demand headline and they are really a capacity headline. A reading of 106.8 does not say the country is shipping far more than it did in 2019. It says the rail-and-truck corridor is doing the work that the road alone cannot do at the price the road is now quoting.
Anyone whose boxes leave a port by rail, or whose domestic long-haul sits on somebody else's trailer, should read this before the peak season books fill up.
Three facts and no more. The July reading is 106.8. June was 107.7. The baseline is the 2017-19 average set to 100, which makes 106.8 the second-highest print of the year. The association names its three drivers plainly: domestic-led growth, steady demand, and tight long-haul truck capacity heading into peak.
Why this is happening now is where the corridor story lives. Intermodal is what shippers reach for when the truck market gets expensive or thin, and it is only reachable if a box can get from the berth onto a flatcar without a long, costly dray. When long-haul truck capacity tightens, the price of a solo move climbs, and volume slides sideways onto rail at roughly the same rate. That is the mechanism behind a reading like this one. It is not that more freight suddenly exists. It is that the same freight is being re-routed onto the corridor that can still carry it at a price someone will pay.
The word that matters most in the release is domestic. Domestic-led growth is a different animal from import-led growth, and the two push on different parts of your cost stack. Import-led strength tightens the ocean leg and the port apron. Domestic-led strength tightens the inland leg and the long-haul truck. If your book is ocean freight and nothing else, a domestic-led index can climb while your lane stays soft, and you will scratch your head over a flat rate when the headline says the market is hot. The pressure is simply sitting somewhere you do not buy.
Who this lands on. A shipper whose cargo hits a port and then runs a thousand miles inland is exactly the person this index describes, because that inland leg is now priced by a tight truck market and a rail network absorbing the overflow from it. A truck-dependent shipper with no rail on its lane pays the most, because it has no second option to lean into. A pure ocean buyer with a short dray into a nearby warehouse is barely touched. An exporter using the same corridor should expect its equipment to get squeezed first, because peak season always takes the fleet from the export side, and empty returns and chassis go before your loaded booking does.
On timing, remember what a July index actually is. It is a reading of a summer month, published in early July, telling you what the corridor was doing as the peak buying season was building. The peak itself runs into autumn. So the number leads the crunch by something like two to three months, which is the prep time you have and no more. I have run inland legs through a peak, and I have watched people treat a July reading as weather, then find in September that every flatcar and every dray on their lane is already spoken for.
The point the headline skips is the direction of travel. Everyone will print the second-highest of the year. Almost nobody will print that it fell from June. A market that is second-highest but decelerating is not the same as one that is accelerating, and for a shipper that distinction is the whole game, because it tells you whether to lock a rate now or wait one more reading. Tight capacity with softening demand is the narrow window where you still find space at a price that has not caught up yet. Tight capacity with firm demand is the market where you get neither.
Let me put a shape on it with the assumptions written out. Say you move 30 trailers a month on a 1,000-mile inland lane. A solo truck move quotes at 2,200 dollars per trailer. Intermodal, all in with dray on both ends, comes to 1,750. The saving is 450 dollars per trailer, so 13,500 dollars a month on that one lane. Intermodal only delivers that, though, if the dray is short and the ramp is near. Stretch the dray, add a two-day dwell, and the saving can halve, or turn into a service penalty the moment a customer starts counting days. My numbers are invented. The shape is the trade: you are not buying cheap rail, you are buying the option of not depending on a tight truck market.
What would change my mind. If the truck market loosens, through drivers, fuel or a softer peak, the pull onto rail fades and intermodal volume slides back down, which would make this reading a peak rather than a trend. If the peak arrives strong, the same tight capacity pushes intermodal higher again and the corridor becomes the only way to hold a schedule. The variable worth watching is long-haul truck capacity itself, not the index.
The temptation is to read a high index as a demand boom and over-commit. The corridor is tight because the alternative is expensive, and that can reverse faster than it built. Book the inland leg early, price the dray honestly, and keep one lane on the truck so you never negotiate without a second option in your pocket.
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