Container drayage is the short-distance transport of shipping containers between ports, rail terminals, warehouses, and final delivery locations. It connects the long-haul ocean or rail leg of a shipment to its next destination — a warehouse, transload facility, distribution center, or end customer. Drayage sounds simple but is operationally complex: port terminal appointments, chassis availability, container weight compliance, hazmat handling, demurrage and detention management, and last mile delivery coordination all have to work together or the shipment stalls.
Container drayage is where international shipments go to die. Not literally — but operationally, more supply chain failures happen in the drayage leg than in the ocean transit, the customs clearance, or the final distribution combined.
A container arrives at the port. The terminal appointment window is tight. The chassis pool is short. The driver shows up and the container isn’t available yet — or it’s available but the chassis he reserved isn’t. Now you’re burning demurrage at $150 to $300 per day while everyone points fingers at everyone else.
Or the container clears the port fine but the delivery location can’t receive it until Thursday. The container sits on a chassis for three days. Detention charges stack up. The trucking company bills you for chassis usage you didn’t plan for.
Or the container is overweight and the driver gets turned back at the scale. Now you need a transload to split the weight across two trucks before the freight can move to its final destination.
These are not edge cases. They are Tuesday in container drayage. And every one of them is preventable with a drayage provider who manages the full picture instead of just dispatching a truck.
We don’t treat drayage as a standalone truck dispatch. We treat it as the critical connector between your ocean or rail shipment and your warehouse, distribution center, or customer — because that’s what it is. Every drayage move we manage includes terminal appointment scheduling, chassis availability confirmation, container weight and overweight assessment, demurrage and detention monitoring from the moment the container is available, and delivery coordination with the receiving facility. One account manager handles the full move. When something changes — and in drayage, something always changes — you hear from us proactively, not after the charges have already started accruing.