Intermodal Transport
Intermodal transport represents the flow of goods where the means of transport (road, rail, air, water) change at least one time on the existing transport route. A separate mode of transport is responsible for its part of the route in the transport chain. Intermodal transport carries freight using specially designed carrying and cargo protecting units. They can easily be swapped between several transport modes. Thus, unloading and reloading of individual items is avoided. It also results in a lower overall payload due to the duplicated load-bearing elements of the rail vehicle and the load carrying units.
Management units for transferring freight from one mode to another are containers, swap bodies, pallets or semi-trailers. Better techniques and management units have facilitated intermodal transfers. The examples include piggyback (TOFC: Trailers On Flat Cars), where truck trailers are placed on rail cars, and LASH (lighter aboard ship), where river barges are placed directly on board sea-going ships.
The most important feature of intermodalism is the provision of a service with one bill of lading. This has necessitated a revolution in organization and information control. At the heart of modern intermodalism are data handling, processing and distribution systems that are essential to ensure safe, reliable and cost effective control of freight movements.
Intermodal terminals must take into account the very different properties of the transport modes involved. For example, road with single load-units carrying stochastic traffic flows, as compared to transport by trains based on timetabled transport of consolidated loads.
Today, intermodal transport is transforming a growing share of the medium and long-haul freight flows across the globe. Intermodal transportation is a leading solution to demands of today’s global supply chains, which are increasingly congested, more expensive, and environmentally unsustainable. By encouraging coordinated movement across all forms of freight delivery, intermodal transportation can build on the best of each transportation type.
In Europe, intermodal transport is an inseparable part of transport policy mostly because of its reduction of negative impacts of road transport on environment, consumption of fuels and energy, costs on roads and highways maintenance, farmland occupation and increase of road traffic safety.
The intermodal transport integrates the system advantages of various transport modes. To give an example, railway is ecologically less harmful transport system than freight road transport. On the other hand, freight road transport is strongly flexible as far as time and access to the end points of transportation are concerned. As for water transport, it affords opportunity of even bigger transport flows with more favorable prices and energy consumption than railway transport. It significantly eliminates accident rate and unburdens land infrastructure.