Wednesday, July 8th, 2026
ALICE has published the report “Intermodal Transport Survey 2025: Unlocking Rail’s Competitive Potential”, providing new insights into the perceptions, challenges and opportunities surrounding intermodal freight transport in Europe.
Developed within ALICE’s Supply Network Coordination and Collaboration Thematic Group (TG4) as part of the activity increase the use of rail, and under the leadership of TG4 Vice-chair Serge Schamschula (Trimble), the survey has counted with the support of Horizon Europe projects IKIGAI, SARIL, REMUNET and MULTIRELOAD. These initiatives are contributing to the development of innovative solutions that improve multimodal connectivity, strengthen rail competitiveness and accelerate the transition towards more sustainable freight transport systems.
The survey gathered responses from 51 stakeholders across the European logistics ecosystem, including shippers, logistics service providers, rail operators, intermodal operators and infrastructure managers. The objective was to assess the root causes of performance challenges and the perceptions around them from different stakeholders´groups, and explore practical pathways to increase the use of rail within European supply chains.
The findings challenge several long-standing assumptions about intermodal transport and suggest that some of the biggest barriers to modal shift may be linked more to perceptions, limited transparency and fragmented communication than to the actual performance of rail services.
Building on several years of work within ALICE’s activity field on Increase the use of rail, this survey continues a structured effort to better understand and address barriers to modal shift. Previous milestones include the ALICE white paper “Increasing the Use of Rail and Intermodal Transport in Europe: Integration of rail freight information with other supply chain solutions”, which combined surveys, interviews and stakeholder workshops to identify the gap between perceived and actual rail performance and highlighted the lack of integration with wider supply chain solutions as a critical barrier.
These reflections have been further consolidated in subsequent ALICE work, including the article Enhancing competitiveness in rail freight and intermodal solutions, which reinforces the importance of addressing perception gaps, improving integration into supply chain solutions and aligning stakeholder expectations to unlock rail and intermodal potential. These insights have been further discussed and consolidated through ALICE community exchanges and high-level events such as the ALICE Logistics Innovation Summit (Learn more about the Summit), in which these insights were connected to ALICE EXPRESS community that is practically supporting shippers and Multimodal Transport Operators to increase the use of rail.
One of the most significant findings concerns transit times.
While intermodal transport is often perceived as inherently slower than road transport, the survey results paint a different picture. Sixty percent of respondents confirmed that intermodal transit times can equal or even outperform road transport on existing corridors. However, a majority of shipper respondents still believe that intermodal transport is always slower than road freight.
The findings indicate a clear gap between perception and operational reality. In many cases, rail services already offer competitive transit times, particularly on established corridors where train schedules benefit from overnight operations and avoid restrictions affecting long-distance road transport.
The survey suggests that increasing visibility of actual corridor performance data could help address misconceptions and encourage greater uptake of intermodal solutions.
The report also challenges the widespread assumption that rail operations are the primary source of delays within intermodal transport chains.
Survey responses indicate that many performance issues originate outside the rail segment itself. First-mile and last-mile operations, terminal processes and truck planning frequently contribute to delays experienced by customers.
A significant proportion of respondents acknowledged that poor pickup planning and last-mile operations can have a substantial impact on overall delivery performance. The findings demonstrate that improving intermodal transport requires attention to the entire logistics chain rather than focusing exclusively on rail punctuality.
This highlights the importance of end-to-end optimisation and stronger coordination between rail operators, terminals, logistics service providers and road transport partners.
Responsibility for intermodal performance is rarely perceived as owned by the stakeholder and is always placed somewhere else. The survey reveals a consistent pattern: each stakeholder group tends to identify the main sources of delays and inefficiencies outside its own domain. Rail actors point to infrastructure and trucking constraints, logistics service providers highlight operator and infrastructure issues, while shippers focus primarily on infrastructure and service reliability. While each of these perspectives reflects real challenges, the overall effect is a misalignment where problems are seen as “somewhere else”. This externalisation of responsibility becomes a structural barrier to improvement, as it reduces the incentive for actors to critically assess and address the issues within their own control.
This calls for a dual shift: stronger collaboration across stakeholders and deeper individual reflection within each group. Improving intermodal performance cannot rely on one actor or one bottleneck being fixed, but requires joint ownership of the system’s performance.
At the same time, each stakeholder needs to identify and act on the levers available in its own operations – whether in planning, execution, coordination, or communication. Respondents frequently pointed to limited visibility, fragmented information flows and inconsistent communication as factors that contribute to negative perceptions of intermodal transport.
The findings suggest that greater transparency, improved data sharing and stronger collaboration could significantly improve performance and customer confidence without requiring major infrastructure investments.
Digital platforms, real-time visibility solutions and shared performance monitoring mechanisms are identified as important tools for strengthening trust and enabling continuous improvement across intermodal supply chains.
One of the most important findings of the survey is that barriers to increasing intermodal transport are often linked more to perceptions, assumptions and lack of transparency than to fundamental capability. While stakeholders frequently express concerns regarding reliability and on-time performance, the survey reveals significant differences in expectations between stakeholder groups and limited visibility of actual performance data.
The findings suggest that better information sharing, greater transparency and stronger collaboration across the supply chain could help align expectations and improve confidence in intermodal services. Rather than representing an unavoidable limitation of rail freight, many of the perceived barriers appear to be addressable through improved communication, data sharing and a shared understanding of performance realities.
The report therefore highlights transparency and cross-stakeholder collaboration as important enablers for increasing the use of rail and intermodal transport.
The survey demonstrates that significant opportunities exist to increase the use of rail and intermodal transport without waiting for large-scale infrastructure investments.
Key opportunities identified by the survey include:
Many of the barriers identified by respondents can be addressed through better visibility, stronger collaboration, improved coordination and more effective communication of actual performance data.
The findings suggest that rapid improvements can be achieved by focusing on operational optimisation across the full transport chain, supporting cross-stakeholder dialogue and enabling more transparent information exchange.
The report also highlights the importance of developing corridor-specific performance indicators, realistic on-time delivery benchmarks and collaborative improvement initiatives that involve all actors in the logistics ecosystem.
The findings strongly support ALICE’s vision for resilient, interconnected and sustainable logistics networks.
Increasing the use of rail remains a central objective within ALICE’s activity field on Increase the Use of Rail and contributes directly to the transition towards a Physical Internet, where transport resources, infrastructure and information are increasingly connected, shared and optimised across modes.
The report reinforces the importance of digitalisation, interoperability and collaborative logistics models in enabling more efficient multimodal transport systems. It also demonstrates the value of building trust and transparency across supply chain actors to improve performance and resilience.
The full report “Intermodal Transport Survey 2025: Unlocking Rail’s Competitive Potential” is available for download.
This publication was produced within the framework of ALICE Supply Network Coordination and Collaboration Thematic Group (TG4) and has benefited from the support of Trimble and the Horizon Europe projects IKIGAI, SARIL, REMUNET and MULTIRELOAD.
ALICE would like to thank all survey participants and contributors whose insights helped shape this report and advance the discussion on the future of intermodal freight transport in Europe.