Trace the journey from door to door
A rail service has a scheduled departure and arrival, but the shipper buys delivery to a destination. Between the two sit a collection truck, a loading terminal, a train path, a border handover and a final delivery slot. The European Court of Auditors identified infrastructure and regulatory barriers to intermodal freight. For a given corridor, ask which parts of the timetable the operator controls. A faster locomotive cannot clear a queue at a terminal with only one available unloading slot.
Measure the cost of variability
Consider two hypothetical services with the same price per container. On one, all ten consignments arrive in four days. On the other, eight take three days and two take eight; average transit is also four days. For a buyer that needs goods on day five, the second service misses two deadlines. To compare offers, add the expected cost of emergency trucking or the inventory needed to absorb late deliveries. Do not charge both in full if one measure would eliminate the need for the other. For time-sensitive spare parts, the recipient can also estimate how many hours of production a missed delivery window might put at risk.
Look for the bottleneck a capital project removes
Longer passing loops can enable longer trains where other parts of the route support them. They do little for throughput if destination terminals cannot receive those trains or scheduled freight paths disappear during maintenance. Track terminal dwell time separately from line-haul time, and record the share of consignments delivered by the agreed hour. Those measures provide a stronger test of a corridor investment than kilometres upgraded in isolation.
Practical check
Compare the distribution of door-to-door arrival times with the buyer’s receiving window, then price the missed slots.