Drayage is a niche shipping service meant for shipping entire containers via road.
FREMONT, CA: If you are either new to international shipping or are developing your involvement with it, you will eventually encounter drayage service.
What is Drayage Service?
Drayage is a niche shipping service meant for shipping entire containers via road. This is different from than LCL service. In LCL, shipping containers are carried to a CFS (container freight position), deconsolidated, and reconsolidated in separate trailers following their geographic target. Those particular shipments are then shipped out on normal semi-trailers.
But what happens if you ship a full truckload of freight? You need the whole container to reach your company's door. There are a few means this can be done: by road and by rail:
Road Transport: Drayage Service
If you are shipping a full freight container, it doesn't need to be deconsolidated. It simply requires to be picked up and brought to your door. This is one of the numerous examples in which drayage service may be employed. You can recruit a drayman to select your container from the port and carry it to your company's dock.
This type of drayage is just meant for brief trips, though. If your company is placed on the coast, it may not be too hard to find a drayman who can convey the container from the port to your dock door, so a direct port-to-drayman-to-door move may be fairly easy!
Intermodal Transport: Drayage Service
Drayage service is not only charted service of your freight container to your door by a trucker – it's any service needed for picking up a whole container and transferring it to another location. Simply put, if you ordered a full freight container and are required to obtain it to inland states, it must still be collected from the port and brought to an intermodal port for rail transportation.
In this case, you would engage a drayman to pick the container up from the ocean port and bring it to the intermodal port. The intermodal carrier would then bring your freight to its terminus rail port, where you would recruit a drayman to obtain your container and bring it to your door.
