Picture a single steel container coming off a ship at a West Coast port. Within hours, it's lifted onto a railcar bound for the interior, then swung onto a truck chassis for the last 50 miles to a distribution center. That one box touched port cranes, a rail network, an inland terminal and a drayage fleet before anything inside it reached a shelf.
Intermodal volume in the United States keeps climbing, and most of the infrastructure making that possible sits far from public view. Executives like Vahooman "Shadow" Mirkhaef, whose work at Cub Terminal spans logistics, industrial services and inland terminal operations, spend their careers inside these overlooked systems.
This piece looks at why intermodal is growing, the four infrastructure layers holding that growth together and where capacity seems to be headed next.
Why Intermodal Shipping Is Booming
Rail traffic has been building strength for months, and intermodal has been one of the clearest beneficiaries. Data from the Association of American Railroads shows cumulative U.S. intermodal volume was up year over year through the first 23 weeks of 2026, with weekly totals climbing even faster as shippers convert freight back to rail from higher-priced trucking.
Mirkhaef frames the shift in structural terms rather than as a short-term blip. The growth isn't accidental, his analysis suggests, but the product of a real reconfiguration in how global freight moves, one pushed along by pandemic-era congestion, geopolitical trade disruptions and the steady rise of e-commerce.
The long view backs that up. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' rail intermodal series, built from Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, shows volume trending upward over time, even through cyclical dips. Trade press has been describing a similar arc, with coverage of the sector pointing to intermodal working through a recovery after a stretch of softer demand tied to shifting consumer spending and freight cycles.
The Infrastructure Systems Most People Don't See
Behind that growth sits a set of systems most shippers never think about until something breaks. Four of them matter most: inland ports, terminal speed, terminal labor and container visibility.
Inland Ports
An inland port is a hub far from any coastline where containers move between rail and truck instead of ship and truck. IANA's North American Intermodal Facilities Directory maps out how extensive this network already is, cataloging container yards, rail ramps and depots spread across the country.
As coastal ports run short on space and face chronic congestion, the inland network becomes more than a convenience. Facilities clustered around hubs like Chicago absorb volume that the coasts can't process fast enough, giving shippers somewhere to redirect freight when ocean gateways back up.
Terminal Speed
How quickly a container clears a terminal doesn't just affect that one shipment. It ripples into every truck run, warehouse slot and delivery window scheduled after it, and equipment shortages make that ripple worse.
Chassis have been a recurring bottleneck. Industry coverage has tracked a long-term decline in the national chassis fleet, alongside a persistent gap between how many new chassis are built each year and how many the industry needs to keep pace with volume. That gap tends to show up as extra dwell time at the ramp, missed appointment windows and containers stuck waiting for equipment that's tied up somewhere else in the network.
Terminal Labor
Terminal work and drayage draw from the same labor pool as the rest of trucking, so the industry's long-running driver shortage lands directly on terminal operations too. The American Trucking Associations has tracked this gap for years and has projected the industry will need to bring on a large wave of new drivers over the next decade just to replace retirements and keep pace with freight growth.
Part of the challenge is demographic. ATA's research points to an aging workforce, with the typical over-the-road driver considerably older than new hires coming into the industry, leaving carriers racing to build a pipeline ahead of a wave of retirements.
Mirkhaef has pointed to this as one of the more overlooked capacity constraints in the network. Navigating that kind of pressure, he argues, requires targeted strategies for workforce development and skilled terminal operations.
Container Visibility
A decade ago, shippers often had only a rough idea where a container actually sat in the network. GPS units, RFID tags and digital gate systems have closed that gap considerably, giving shippers a near real-time view of a box's location from the moment it leaves a vessel to the moment it clears a warehouse dock.
Much of that visibility depends on shared data standards. IANA maintains the facility and equipment data that keeps location information consistent across carriers, terminals and technology providers, which is what lets a tracking system built by one company talk to a terminal run by another.
Mirkhaef frames inspection capacity as a quieter constraint sitting underneath all that tracking data. Rigorous oversight, he has said, is a vital safeguard against the kind of unexpected equipment failures that visibility data alone can't prevent.
Where Intermodal Capacity Is Headed Next
Automation and equipment tracking are moving from nice-to-have upgrades toward standard practice at busy terminals. Knowing where every chassis and container sits in near real time is becoming table stakes rather than a competitive edge, and operators who haven't invested in that technology are starting to fall behind on service reliability.
Rebuilding the chassis fleet remains a parallel priority because equipment bottlenecks are among the more fixable constraints on terminal throughput once fleets catch up with demand. Mirkhaef ties both trends back to a broader point about sustainable growth. Turning a volume spike into a system that holds up over time takes operational discipline paired with infrastructure readiness, not just a temporary surge in capacity.
Labor remains the wildcard. ATA's long-term shortage forecast suggests the workforce gap will keep shaping how much of the coming growth the industry can actually absorb, regardless of progress made on equipment and automation.
Intermodal Infrastructure's Role in Keeping America's Freight Moving Forward
Go back to that container coming off the ship. By the time it reaches a store shelf, it's passed through an inland port, cleared a terminal gate, ridden with a driver pulled from an already stretched labor pool and been tracked the whole way by systems most people never see. Inland ports, terminal speed, workforce and tracking technology rarely make headlines, yet freight doesn't move without them.
The bigger question ahead isn't whether more volume can be squeezed through today's system. It's whether inland capacity, equipment fleets and workforce pipelines can be built fast enough to keep pace with freight demand that shows no real sign of slowing down.
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