The following information is collected from our service division managers along with various industry resources and gives a generalized scope of what has been going on this past week in freight transportation.

The national average price of diesel fuel is $3.338 per gallon for the week of 7/19/2021.

Intermodal

• Minor update on the NS chassis recall situation. Currently about 1500 of the 5100 chassis (total recalled is roughly 13% of their domestic chassis fleet) have been fixed. We are still expecting there to be chassis shortages through the end of the year/early next year on their network.
• There is a large backlog of international containers in Chicago due to pandemic-related delays, chassis problems, and stacking. The Union Pacific suspended inbound international container shipments to Chicago for a week to try to clear out this backlog.
• Wildfires in British Columbia are creating embargoes on the CN and CP in and out of Vancouver.
• Kristy Knichel was on Freightwaves “What the Truck?!?” podcast with Timothy Dooner. She provided some insight on the state of intermodal.

Less than Truckload

• Uber Freight rolls out LTL offering, leverages BlueGrace Logistics network.

Over the Road

• The market is still in a supply-driven capacity-crunch phase where carriers have pricing power. Drivers aren’t yet re-entering the industry in meaningful numbers, although June’s recent employment numbers do show promise. Spot market load volumes are more than double what they were this time last year.