A truckload has one custodian. An intermodal container has several — and the theft usually happens in the seams between them.
By the Sentrick Cargo team · Published July 17, 2026
Intermodal is the most efficient way to move a container across a continent, and structurally one of the hardest to secure. The reason isn't the rail line — line-haul is often the safest leg of the trip. It's that a single intermodal move is really a chain of moves: a drayage tractor to the ramp, a lift onto a well car, a long rail leg, a lift off at a destination ramp, a wait in a stack, and a second drayage leg to the consignee. Every one of those transitions is a change of custody, and each change creates a moment where responsibility is ambiguous and visibility drops. Cargo theft finds those moments reliably, because they are exactly where nobody is quite watching.
Over-the-road freight has one driver who is accountable from pickup to delivery. Intermodal splits that accountability across a drayage carrier, a railroad, a terminal operator, and often an IMC or broker coordinating the whole thing. Each party is diligent about its own leg — and each is largely blind to the others. The shipper sees milestone events: ingated, departed, arrived, available, outgated. Between those pings, hours or days pass with no information beyond an assumption that the container is where the last event implied. A container can sit in a stack for days as a perfectly normal part of the process. It can also sit there while its contents are removed, and both look identical on a status screen.
The at-rest hours dominate, just as they do in trucking — but intermodal multiplies them. The exposure clusters in a few places:
Intermodal leans heavily on the bolt seal, and a seal is worth having — but it's a forensic tool, not a security one. A seal tells you, at the moment someone finally inspects it, that the door was opened. It doesn't tell you when, where, or by whom, and it says nothing while the theft is underway. Worse, a seal can be cut and replaced with a convincing counterfeit, or the container can be entered through a panel that leaves the seal untouched. By the time a discrepancy surfaces at the consignee's dock, the load has passed through several custodians and multiple states, and reconstructing where it happened is close to impossible. A seal assigns blame after the fact. It does not prevent anything.
Intermodal already generates tracking data, which is why the exposure surprises people. But rail milestones are event-based, not continuous: they tell you the container reached a checkpoint, not what happened between checkpoints. And even a live GPS dot only answers "where." The signals that precede an intermodal loss are behavioral — a drayage leg that stops somewhere it has never stopped, a container that stays in a yard well past its normal dwell for that lane, a door opening during a rail leg where no handling should occur, a temperature or light change inside a box that should be sealed and dark, an outgate that doesn't match the booked carrier. None of those show up in a milestone feed, and none of them look wrong on a map.
What intermodal needs is the one thing the chain structurally lacks: a witness that stays with the container across every custody change. A device travelling with the box doesn't care whose leg it's on — it reports the same way in a drayage yard, a stack, and a well car. That continuity is what turns a chain of blind spots into a single monitored journey. The value comes from interpretation rather than data volume: learning what normal looks like for this lane — the expected route, the typical ramp dwell, the handling a container should and shouldn't see — and grading deviations on a five-level status (Safe, Caution, Alert, Danger, SOS). A dispatcher then sees the difference between a container that's waiting, which is routine, and a container that's being worked, which is not.
Verisk CargoNet's 2025 year-end analysis put estimated cargo theft losses at roughly $725 million, a jump of about 60% year over year, with an average loss near $273,990 per theft — a market where organized crews are actively hunting for structural weaknesses. Intermodal offers one by design: the more times a container changes hands, the more seams there are to exploit. You can't remove the handoffs without giving up what makes intermodal work. What you can do is stop treating each leg as a separate problem and give the container itself a continuous account of its own journey — so the gap between "ingated" and "available" stops being a place where a load can quietly disappear.
Figures in this article are drawn from Verisk CargoNet's 2025 year-end cargo theft analysis, released January 22, 2026: "Cargo Theft Losses Surge to Estimated $725 Million in 2025, Verisk CargoNet Analysis Reveals."