Every intermodal move has one weak joint: the moment a box stops being a maritime asset and becomes a road asset. Everything upstream is planned in days. Everything downstream is planned in minutes. The two schedules meet at the quay, and the gap between them is where margin disappears.
The ninety-minute problem
A container discharged at Le Havre is theoretically available the moment the crane releases it. In practice it waits — for customs clearance, for a slot, for a driver whose tachograph still has hours on it. Measured across our own corridors in 2025, the median dwell between crane release and gate-out was eighty-seven minutes. Not catastrophic. Just repeated four thousand times a year.
What we changed
We stopped treating the port call as an event and started treating it as a window. Three changes did most of the work:
- Pre-cleared paperwork. Customs documentation is filed against the bill of lading, not against the physical arrival, so clearance completes while the vessel is still at sea.
- Slot-matched driver rostering. Drivers are rostered against the berth window rather than the published ETA, which absorbs the two to six hours of drift a North Sea crossing routinely produces.
- Chassis staged on the terminal. A trailer already inside the gate removes the single longest queue in the sequence.
Median dwell is now thirty-one minutes. The corridor did not get shorter — the waiting did.
Where it does not work
None of this survives a congested terminal. When a port is running above about eighty-five percent of crane capacity, the berth window itself becomes unreliable and slot-matched rostering starts costing more in idle driver hours than it saves in dwell. On those lanes we still run the old model, and we say so in the quote.