Drayage & container moves

A container can cross an ocean flawlessly and still get stuck the moment it hits the dock. Drayage — the short-haul trucking that moves a container between the port, the rail yard, and the warehouse — is the unglamorous, essential link that keeps an import or export moving. Miss the appointment, run out of chassis, or let the free time expire, and a box that crossed the Pacific sits collecting demurrage and per-diem charges by the day. Drayage done right is invisible; done wrong, it’s the most expensive bottleneck in the whole chain.

RS Group handles drayage with the timing and equipment awareness it demands. We move your container off the dock and into the supply chain — coordinating the chassis, the appointment, and the next leg — so the box keeps moving and the charges don’t.

Need help moving your container from the port?

Getting a container out of a port terminal is a logistics problem of its own: securing a chassis, booking a pickup appointment in the terminal’s system, beating the free-time clock before demurrage starts, and lining up a truck the moment the box is available. It’s a tightly timed dance, and a missed step is expensive. That’s exactly the part we own. Tell us the container, the terminal, and where it needs to go — we coordinate the pull, the chassis, and the move, and follow the box until it’s delivered.

Drayage services we offer

Drayage isn’t one move; it’s whichever short-haul leg your container needs. We cover the full set.

Warehouse to port

The export side: we move your loaded container from your facility or our Atlanta warehouse to the port terminal, timed to the vessel’s cutoff so it makes the sailing. Miss the cutoff and the container waits for the next ship — so we book the move against the cutoff, not after it.

Intermodal

The long middle: when a container travels part of its journey by rail and part by truck, we handle the truck legs that bracket the rail move — port to rail ramp on one end, rail ramp to final destination on the other. Intermodal blends rail’s cost efficiency over distance with trucking’s flexibility at the ends, and the drayage legs are what make it work.

Truck to rail

We move containers between truck and rail ramp in either direction — getting a box onto a departing train, or off an arriving one and onto a truck for final delivery. Rail ramps run on appointments and cutoffs of their own, and we coordinate the truck leg to hit them.

The RS Group advantage

Drayage rewards two things: local knowledge and relentless coordination. Ours runs from metro Atlanta, a major intermodal and distribution hub minutes from Hartsfield-Jackson, and plugs straight into our 80,000 sq ft Atlanta warehouse for cross-dock, transload, and storage between legs — so a container can come off the port, get unloaded or transloaded, and move on without sitting idle. Behind it is a 34,000+ carrier network for capacity when terminals are jammed, and a real person who watches the free-time and per-diem clock so charges don’t quietly accrue. We don’t just move the box — we manage the timing that decides whether the move costs what it should.

For containers that need to be unstuffed and reloaded onto trailers, see container transloading; to store between legs, see Atlanta warehousing.