By Richie Lin      Photo：NEHEMIAS GOMEZ FOTOGRAFIA

Recently all shipping lines began to use blank sailings to control the space allocation in the market. We all know this will help to reduce the supply of containers in order to maintain the balance with the demand of containers. Customers might find out their bookings rolled over to next schedule or next next schedule. This caused lots of uncertainty to predict the arrival of products at the shelves of stores. Additionally, labor shortage of railway companies is still causing problems to containers moving inland from ports. It still has to wait around 14 to 21 days even longer to be arranged transferring inland by railways after being discharged at ports. Influenced by blank sailings and the labor shortage, the transit time from cargo ready to finally delivered to the destinations will be around 60 ~75 days. Transload from west coast ports will be a good option If customers want to reduce the transit time of delivering products into the inland cities of USA such as Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis.

Transloading is transferring a shipment from one mode of transportation to another, such as from ship to rail, or from ship to truck. For the U.S. imports, transloading means unloading international cargo from standardized 20ft or 40ft containers and reloading it to the U.S. domestic 53ft trailers. Container can be booked to the west coast ports, then customs cleared and picked up from ports to the warehouse of transloading. When the containers arrive at the warehouse, cargo will be unloaded from the container then load into the 53ft trailer right way. To make the transfer efficient and reliable, cargo on the tail of ocean containers will end up in the nose of truck trailers. Once finishing loading the cargo, there will be a new seal at the door of the trailer to prove that door will not be opened again before arriving at the destination. The 53ft trailer will deliver cargo directly to the door of the assigned store or factory directly and the container will be empty returned to the ports without causing any detentions. The charge structure of transloading from Asian ports to USA inland cities will be included ocean freight from Asian ports to west coast ports, the customs clearance, pick up containers from ports to warehouse, transloading at warehouse, and the delivery of 53ft truck to destinations. It will take around 30 days from Asian ports to the designated locations of customers in USA. Therefore, If customer is willing to pay more charges, transloading at USA west coast ports can save more time from moving cargo from Asian ports to USA inland cities under current unpredictable conditions.

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