The trucks got expensive, so the freight moved to rail, in record numbers

The most consequential number in American freight this quarter did not come from a railroad boardroom. It came from shippers voting with their cargo, and the vote was for rail.

Railroads hauled a record number of domestic containers in the second quarter, as shippers banked some of the largest savings against trucking in the decade-long history of the Journal of Commerce's Intermodal Savings Index. In the first quarter the average saving of moving a spot-market load by intermodal rather than truck reached 30.6 per cent, the highest the index has recorded and nearly double the traditional 16 to 19 per cent. For the first time in the measure's history, the spot market favoured intermodal outright.

The mechanism is the fuel spike bleeding across from the road. When the spring war with Iran sent diesel prices climbing, truckload rates, already tightening on scarce capacity, jumped further. Rail, which burns far less fuel per tonne-mile, suddenly looked cheaper by a wide margin, and freight followed the price. J.B. Hunt set a company intermodal record for the quarter, citing shippers struggling to secure trucks and absorbing the fuel shock.

The aggregate data confirms the shift. Through the first 30 weeks of 2026, US intermodal volume rose 3.8 per cent year on year to more than 8.4 million units, outpacing a 2.7 per cent gain in carloads, with the week ending 1 August up 4.8 per cent even as carloads slipped. June set a monthly intermodal record.

The gain is real, but it comes with a warning. The same surge is straining networks at the gateways and switching yards, where labour and track capacity are finite, precisely as published service metrics show reliability slipping. The freight has arrived. Whether the railroads can move it well enough to keep it, once diesel eases and trucking rates soften, is the question the record papers over.