Drayage Services and Your Business

What is Drayage Service?

You know that when you order a package, it doesn’t normally get loaded onto a truck outside your seller’s door and brought directly to yours. There’s a chain of shorter trips between Point A and Point B. But what you may not know is what those steps are and what they’re called. The first and last part of your package’s journey – its trip to and from the railroad depot or shipyard – is trucking. When a trip uses a container truck, that trip is known in logistics as drayage.

Types of Drayage Service

If you start looking into drayage rates for your business, here’s a brief list of terms you might come across:

• Door-to-door: The trucker picks up your goods from the seller and drives them to you.
• Inter-carrier: The trucker picks up goods from one carrier’s warehouse or shipping hub and brings them to another’s. The two carriers may have different shipping networks or use different forms of transport.
• Intra-carrier: A single carrier uses a drayage service to bring goods between two shipping hubs they own.
• Shuttle: A warehouse is overcrowded or unsuitable, so a trucker brings goods from there to a temporary stopping point.
• Pier: A specific name for moving goods from a railroad depot by highway to a pier.

Why You Might Need It

You know what the country’s infrastructure looks like – the vast network of railroads, highways, and air and sea shipping routes. But all of that infrastructure is useless unless you can get your goods to and from its hubs. Drayage service is contract-driven and flexible, so it gets your orders where you need them, when you need them.

Next time you need drayage services, contact R&A Trucking. R&A Trucking provides drayage services to and from the port or local rail ramp. R&A Trucking vigilantly manages freight to ensure timely service and control costs.