Record US Intermodal Volumes Stall at Drayage Shortage, Threatening Cross-Border Reliability

US intermodal volumes surged to a new annual high of 21,697 loaded containers on the 7-day moving average, driven by cost savings and conversion from road to rail. Weekly North American rail traffic totaled 537,397 carloads and intermodal units for the week ending September 26, up 4.85% year over year, with intermodal containers and trailers up 6.3%. The demand picture is the strongest it has been all year.

The bottleneck is not rail linehaul — it is drayage. Industry executives at Trimble Insight 2026 identified a shrinking pool of drayage drivers as the primary constraint on further intermodal expansion. With chassis availability tight and driver recruitment lagging demand, the drayage leg is setting the ceiling on how much freight can actually move intermodally, regardless of how many containers railroads can handle.

For Canadian shippers, the ripple effects cross the border. Cross-border intermodal flows from Western Canada through Vancouver and from Eastern Canada through Montreal depend on the same constrained US drayage ecosystem at destination. When US drayage turn times stretch, equipment detention charges accrue, rail car cycles slow, and door-to-door transit reliability erodes — costs that fall on the shipper regardless of which side of the border the box originates on. Compounding this, nearshoring growth between the US and Mexico is absorbing cross-border trucking capacity, with a shrinking driver pool, tougher customs enforcement, and rising cargo theft further tightening the market. Canadian shippers are competing for the same constrained capacity.

The drayage shortage is structural, not a Q4 blip. Cross-border drivers face specialized licensing, customs procedures, and security vetting that limit the labor pool. As long as US import demand and nearshoring volumes remain elevated, drayage will be the gating factor for intermodal growth nationwide, and Canadian lanes will feel the friction.

What shippers should do: Build an extra 1–2 days of transit buffer into Q4 cross-border intermodal commitments and confirm drayage capacity at destination before booking rail. Negotiate demurrage and detention protections into carrier contracts, and for time-sensitive loads evaluate FTL alternatives. Where door-to-door pricing is available, lock in the full intermodal chain rather than pricing the rail leg alone, so detention risk is borne by the party best able to manage it.