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IntelliTrans SVP of Sales and Marketing Matt Everson recently sat down with The Logistics of Logistics to break down four of the most consequential — and most underestimated — realities of bulk rail freight. The clips below capture his key insights, with additional context on the data, the dollars, and what purpose-built rail logistics management actually makes possible.
Most transportation professionals understand truck. The carrier market is visible, competitive, and relatively easy to benchmark. Rail is different in almost every dimension that matters operationally.
Bulk rail freight moves commodities that come out of the ground: chemicals, plastics, agricultural products, metals, aggregates, lumber. The equipment is specialized — tank cars, hoppers, gondolas, boxcars — and the carrier network is constrained. Where a shipper can call a spot truck carrier to fill a gap, there is no equivalent move in rail. You work with the Class I carriers that serve your lanes, and you connect through Class II short lines to reach facilities that are not on the main network. IntelliTrans TMS connects into 95% of those Class II short lines in North America — a network built over more than 30 years that cannot be replicated quickly.
The scale of this market is often under appreciated. IntelliTrans processes data for roughly 40% of North American rail cars — excluding intermodal — on any given day, per Everson. For bulk shippers in chemicals, agriculture, and building products, that market share translates into a data advantage that generic TMS platforms, built primarily for dry van and parcel, simply cannot match. The nuances of rail — lease management, yard operations, demurrage exposure, fleet sizing — require a system purpose-built to handle them, not one that has toggled on a few extra fields.
Rail location data exists. Every railcar carries an RFID tag that is read by sensors along the network, and those reads flow through Railinc's Car Location Message (CLM) system to shippers. The problem is not access to the data. It is what happens to the data before it reaches a shipper's screen.
One of the most consequential data quality issues in rail logistics management is the difference between a constructive placement (CP) and an actual placement (AP) event. A constructive placement is recorded when a carrier declares a railcar available, even if it has not physically arrived at the facility. When carriers fail to update CP records accurately, the errors cascade: transit time calculations distort, turn time metrics lose reliability, and fleet sizing models built on that data produce the wrong answers. Catching and correcting those errors requires both purpose-built software and an experienced operations team working the data continuously.
The payoff for getting this right is predictive ETA accuracy that carrier-reported averages cannot deliver. IntelliTrans TMS builds dynamic ETAs from actual observed transit performance across similar lanes in recent weeks, not from what a carrier says a lane typically takes. If congestion around a major hub is adding four days to moves right now, that intelligence is in the ETA before a production planner discovers it the hard way. That kind of foresight is only possible with a data set that has been cleaned and contextualized at scale. In IntelliTrans's case, that work has been ongoing since 1992.
Demurrage is the daily fee railroads charge when a shipper holds a car beyond the allotted free time for loading or unloading, typically 24 to 48 hours on Class I railroads. At $75 to $200 per railcar per day on standard freight cars, and higher for specialized equipment like tank cars, the charges accumulate fast. A shipper moving 50 cars per month who averages just one extra day of demurrage per car faces $3,750 to $7,500 in monthly charges before escalation clauses apply, per Steel Wheel Logistics industry benchmarks. At the scale IntelliTrans customers operate, those numbers grow significantly.
What makes demurrage particularly costly for bulk shippers is that the charges are not always accurate. Carriers sometimes bill based on constructive placement data that was never correctly updated, effectively charging a shipper for time a car was not actually available to them. Without clean placement event records and the documentation to dispute incorrect billing, shippers absorb costs they should never have paid. As Cargill's VP of Global Rail and Barge described it in Surface Transportation Board testimony, these charges amount to "death by a thousand cuts" for large bulk operators, per FreightWaves reporting. Per-instance charges ranging from $60 to $500 add up to millions annually for high-volume shippers.
IntelliTrans TMS addresses this on two fronts. The system tracks placement events with enough precision to flag discrepancies before they become billed charges, and proactive alerts notify teams when a car is approaching the demurrage threshold. When charges arrive that should not have, IntelliTrans's operations team goes to the carriers directly to dispute and recover on the shipper's behalf, not just provide the data and leave the shipper to fight it alone.
Unlike truck, where a carrier brings equipment to the shipper, bulk rail shippers typically own or lease their railcars. Those assets are the shipper's responsibility from the moment they leave the facility until they return empty, and the cost of getting the fleet size wrong runs in both directions.
Too many cars means idle assets collecting lease fees and storage costs while contributing nothing to production. Too few means production risk: the right car is unavailable at the wrong moment, and unplanned downtime follows. The right number (what Everson calls the "Goldilocks effect") depends on turn time by lane, transit time by carrier and route, facility dwell patterns, sales forecasts, and seasonal demand cycles. Every one of those inputs requires accurate historical data to model correctly. If the underlying turn time data is distorted by bad placement event records, the fleet size recommendation is built on a faulty foundation.
IntelliTrans TMS fleet sizing analytics forecast asset needs 12 to 24 months out, by lane, by car type, and by commodity, using actual observed performance rather than carrier averages. For shippers managing hundreds of leased or owned cars across multiple facilities and origins, the difference between a right-sized fleet and an oversized one is a direct line item on the P&L. Getting there requires the kind of longitudinal, industry-specific data that only a purpose-built rail logistics management system accumulates over time.
If your rail operations are running on spreadsheets, a basic tracking tool, or a TMS that was not built for bulk freight, there is a gap between what your data could be telling you and what you are actually able to act on. See how IntelliTrans TMS helps bulk shippers close that gap, with purpose-built rail logistics management, clean data, and the expertise to make it useful.