BY GARY FRANTZ, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
INTERMODAL
Transportation Report
Intermodal service providers are finding that last
year’s stellar performance is a tough act to follow,
as they face down challenges ranging from China
tariffs to aging infrastructure to softening demand.
INTERMODAL TRANSPORTATION HAS EVOLVED
and matured in the four decades since Dave Yeager’s mom
and dad started The Hub Group as the industry’s first
professional intermodal marketing company (IMC). Yet
in those 40-plus years, he’s never seen a year like 2018.
“It was a phenomenal year as a service provider, because
capacity was so very tight,” recalls Yeager, who as a freshly
minted college grad back in 1975 took his first full-time job
in operations with the then 20-employee company. Today,
he’s Hub’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Pricing …
[went] up to levels that I haven’t seen in my career.”
As with other transportation modes, intermodal’s 2018
performance, while certainly rewarding for service provid-
ers, is proving to be a tough act to follow as the industry
enters the final quarter of 2019. “We are expecting the
remainder of the year to be more of a traditional peak
season, more like 2017, which was a good peak, but not
as hectic as 2018. That was … an anomaly,” says Yeager,
whose Oak Park, Illinois, company fields a fleet of 38,000
GPS-tracking–enabled containers and 5,000 trucks, has
more than 5,000 employees, and generates some $4 billion
in annual revenue.
An informal poll of industry executives, coming off a
banner 2018, finds them generally upbeat about the current
year, although challenges persist. Among the issues that
have affected or continue to affect the market: the impact
of China tariffs and whipsawing trade policies, soft demand,
ample long-haul truck capacity, inventory pull-downs,
insufficient infrastructure, rail-network adjustments and
congestion at major rail hubs, and, earlier this year, severe
Midwest weather that flooded roads and rail lines and
delayed freight for days.
“Most of the issues that impacted [domestic inter-
modal] volumes were one-of-a-kind occurrences,” says
Joni Casey, president and chief executive officer of the
Clear track
ahead or
challenges
around the
bend?
