According to the Association of American Railroads, at the beginning of July, U.S. intermodal volume climbed to 12.9% vs. the previous year, posting double-digit gains for months. Yet, the operating data tells a different story that matters more to shippers. Network fluidity has tightened with dwell times creeping up across most Class 1 railroads, and average train speeds are slowing simultaneously. This means that directors of rail and supply chain leaders managing intermodal volume for bulk and break-bulk freight have less time than ever to catch a delay before it reaches inventory, production, and customer commitments.
When a network fills up, rail cars spend more time waiting and less time moving, and the buffer a shipper used to have between a problem developing and a problem landing on the operation gets thinner. This is the real state of rail heading into the second half of 2026.
The advantage now belongs to teams that have decided in advance which signals require a response, who is responsible for making it, and how to rank the exceptions competing for a limited amount of attention.
Operational siloes turn routine delays into full disruptions
Most rail disruptions that affect a bulk operation don’t start off as dramatic events. They creep in as ordinary delays that no one caught in time. For example, a tank car that misses its receiving window at a plant or a car that’s diverted mid-route and quietly moves under two billing segments that no one reconciled. The common thread is the gap between seeing a car's status and being able to act on it.
A team that tracks shipments across a handful of railroad portals, a spreadsheet, and a few inboxes can see plenty. What it cannot easily do is separate the status update that requires action from the dozens that don’t, route that update to the person who owns the response and give that person enough context and lead time to resolve it before it becomes an additional charge or a shutdown. When the network was faster, the gap didn’t matter as much. But with today's dwell times and velocity, it’s exactly where routine delays become disruptions.
4 signals to watch for
Visibility tells you where a car is, but it does not tell you whether to worry. The shippers who stay ahead of delays learn to read a small set of operational signals that separate noise from risk.
1. Dwell against free time. Demurrage and accessorial charges have been contentious enough to warrant an ongoing STB rulemaking, a reminder of how quickly these costs add up when free time lapses unnoticed. The more important actionable signal in bulk operations is when a car is nearing the end of its free time. A demurrage risk should surface 48-72 hours before free time expires, with enough runway for a team to contact the facility, escalate with the railroad, or document the situation before the charge is assessed. An alert that fires after the charge lands is a reporting tool, not an operations tool.
2. Cycle time by facility. A car sitting a couple of days longer than planned at one receiving facility is not just a dwell number, its working capital tied up and a fleet that is effectively smaller than it looks. Materials that don’t arrive in a timely manner cascade into production delays next. Watching turns facility by facility, rather than as a blended network average, can reveal where the fleet is actually leaking and allow you to make more targeted changes.
3. Sequence against your own windows. When it comes to production, arrival status alone is not enough. What matters is whether incoming cars are lined up in the right sequence relative to the unloading schedule. A car that arrives on time but is out of order can still affect production windows.
4. Network-level developments upstream. The most valuable signals that a delay is headed your way often come from outside your own fleet. When dwell starts climbing in a specific corridor, when congestion builds at a major interchange, or when an embargo forms at a border crossing, that pattern appears across many shippers before it reaches any single fleet. A team that is plugged into that broader view can plan around a developing situation rather than react after its cars are already stuck in a backed-up lane.
None of these signals is useful as a daily report reviewed the next morning. Unless you have access to real-time data and overall network awareness, costs and delays become inevitable.
Assign ownership in advance of exceptions
Reading signals is one thing, but without assigned owners to make the call, nothing changes. The operations that handle rail disruption well assign owners to specific exceptions and answer the questions: when this specific exception fires, who acts on it, and what are they authorized to do?
That clarity is what speeds up response time. When a dwell alert is issued for a car bound for a plant, it should automatically be routed to the person who can call the facility and the railroad. It shouldn’t spend time sitting in a shared issues queue while everyone assumes someone else will handle it. When a car is diverted mid-route, the person coding it to the correct cost center, carrier, and purchase order should already know the standard procedure to remedy the situation as it happens. A diversion that is coded incorrectly creates downstream accounting problems that are painful to unwind weeks later. Exception ownership doesn’t need to be an org chart exercise. But done correctly, it can be the impetus that turns a detected problem into a resolved one before free time expires.
Ownership also needs to survive the transitions that rail imposes on every shipper as a load moves across the country. Railroad and facility changes each generate new events from multiple carriers in inconsistent formats that can slip through the cracks unless someone owns them end-to-end. The teams that stay ahead assign that ownership deliberately with a single, normalized view of the car's history so the response does not stall while people reconcile which data is right.
Prioritize by consequence, not by chronology
In a busy network, a team cannot manage every exception at once. Yet, treating them on a first-come, first-served basis guarantees that the expensive ones get buried under the trivial ones. The discipline that separates the operations staying ahead is triage by consequence. That means ranking each exception by what it actually threatens and prioritizing those with higher production and financial consequences.
The hierarchy is rarely about the size of the demurrage charge. A missed rail car is more than a logistical inconvenience; it’s a production-line event. An unplanned production shutdown from a delayed or missing car can cost far more per hour than any accessorial charge attached to it. A covered hopper running behind during harvest season is a pricing decision that affects a selling window, not just a late car. A regulated tank car whose safety window is closing during an interchange is a compliance exposure. Each of these outranks a routine dwell exception at a facility with slack in the schedule, and a team that has ranked exceptions in advance knows which one to focus on first.
The signal to prioritize should always answer the same question: what does this delay put at risk downstream? Is it inventory, a production line, a customer commitment, a regulatory obligation? By sorting the day's exceptions against that question, a team with limited hours spends its hours where the consequences are greatest. Sort by timestamp, and the network decides for you.
With the way that intermodal growth has held for months, cross-border volume keeps climbing, and grain harvest movements build into the fall; rail volume is not going to ease up in the second half of 2026.
The shippers who will stay ahead are tightening the loop between signal and action: deciding which signals matter, assigning ownership of each, and ranking exceptions by consequence before the busy week arrives rather than during it. In a slowing network, the half hour of lead time a good signal buys you is often the difference between a phone call and a shutdown, and revenue and loss.
