Intermodal volumes finish 2022 with declines, reports IANA

As had been the case for several prior months, December intermodal volumes ended 2022 with a decline, according to data provided to LM by the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA).

Total December volume—at 1,325,121—fell 7.8% annually, trailing November’s 1,390,155 units. Trailers—at 78,074—fell 28.4% compared to December 2021, below November’s 30.8% annual decline. Domestic containers—at 632,207—were off 8.2%. And all domestic equipment, which is comprised of trailers and domestic containers, fell 10.9%, to 710,281. ISO, or international containers, fell 3.8%, to 614,840.

For all of 2022, IANA reported that total intermodal volume—at 17,716,445—was down 3.9% compared to 2021. Trailers—at 924,259—decreased 23.8%, and domestic containers—at 8,147,044—were up 1.6%. All domestic equipment—at 9,071,303—fell 1.8%. ISO containers were down 6.0%, to 8,645,142.

IANA President & CEO Joni Casey told LM in a November interview that based on third quarter volumes, it certainly seems as if capacity and fluidity were returning to the intermodal network.

“Quarterly volumes are still relatively muted, so it’s hard to tell if this will become the new norm especially given the lack of definitive peak season numbers,” she said.

Larry Gross, president of Gross Transportation Consulting, said at last year’s RailTrends conference that the ongoing decline in domestic volume going back to March, when looking back at calendar year 2022, will be viewed as the real Peak Season month for intermodal, in terms of the highest level of intermodal activity for the year.

“We are seeing a pretty steady decline in intermodal domestic volume, this is not a capacity issue anymore,” he said. “This is a market demand issue that we are seeing right now.”

While there is an ongoing domestic intermodal decline, Gross explained that IPI (inland point intermodal), or international volume had a huge drop around this time last year, “when the ocean carriers turned off their business and then…turned it back on when they got to February and March,” because there was enough volume and improvement to allow the equipment to start venturing inland again.

That situation, he said, will lead to some significant year-over-year volume improvements, for the fourth quarter, with the caveat that those numbers are much more about what happened last year as opposed to what is happening now.

At the moment, Gross said that the only real area of intermodal growth is in the domestic private container arena, for companies like J.B. Hunt, and Schneider National, among others, more so than railroad domestic containers, which he said is largely offsetting the growth being seen on the domestic private container side.

“There is very little growth year-to-date, in terms of total domestic [volume],” he said. “It is up only a fraction of a point. So, all of this growth we are seeing among the publicly-traded intermodal carriers, is really, it appears to me, a market share shift that is occurring, and we are not growing the size of the volume, at least not this year.”

Looking at intermodal import and export activity, Gross said roughly 60% of what happens on an intermodal basis in North America is directly driven by import and export volume, with a longstanding intermodal theme being a huge gap between the export volumes coming out of North America and the import volumes that are arriving.