When you ship an ocean container over the road, a standard trucking company might be all you need. But certain shipments really call for a heavy haul trucking company – a carrier that can operate legally at more than the federally-defined maximum gross weight.
And sometimes – even if a heavy shipment wasn’t your original plan – you can save a lot of money by working with a heavy haul expert.
There are no special heavy shipping rates on container vessels. Ask a steamship line for a quote, and it doesn’t matter if you’re filling a container with 5,000 lbs. or 55,000 lbs. The per-container ocean rate is the same.
But some heavy loads can’t be shipped in containers. And the total cost of transportation includes rates for other services besides the ocean crossing.
Say you need to move the machines from three shuttered US factories into a facility overseas. Or you’re providing several huge components needed to build an offshore oil rig. When you transport those items, that shipment is called heavy lift project cargo.
Project cargo might require multiple containers, it’s often heavier and bigger than the average ocean shipment, and it poses some special challenges:
One of the best ways to save money on international shipping is to load containers with as much weight as the law allows. After you load them, of course, you need to get that heavy shipment to the port, and then from the destination port to the receiver.
Those over-the-road trips can be tricky. It takes a special kind of service provider – ideally a heavy haul freight broker – to move a heavy shipment safely, legally and economically.
A major rail line in the New York Metro area was able to source the steel rail it needed in the UK. The company arranged ocean transport to the Port of NY/NJ, but transporting the steel rail from New Jersey to Connecticut was going to be a challenge since some of the rail sections were 132 feet long.
Many global shippers of dense, heavy freight fail to maximize container payloads and, as a result, inflate heavy freight shipping costs 20% or more. But by working with the right landside partners, heavy freight shippers can maximize container weight on the water to reduce the total number of container shipments annually – and still deliver door-to-door, without transloading.
Sometimes you have to load a truck with extra-heavy freight—for example, to transport large machinery to an ocean port. Sometimes it just pays to ship heavy—for instance, to save money on ocean transportation by fitting all the weight you can into a container.
Either way, it’s important to understand heavy haul freight rates and know what it takes to transport heavy freight over the road.
For global shippers of oversized (e.g., machinery, construction equipment) and heavy freight (e.g., stone, tile, metal, forgings, castings and even bottled water), keeping freight costs low requires added expertise and, sometimes, a little creativity. Here are 15 ideas to reduce costs for oversized and heavy freight.
When you ship oversize freight, the length, height and/or width of the load dictate that you’ll need special permits for truck transportation. But often, of course, an oversize load is a heavy load as well. That’s why it’s important to understand the truck weight limits that apply to oversize shipments.
If you had to move a huge piece of machinery overseas, would you know what to do? Here’s how one shipper, with no prior experience, solved its oversize cargo transportation puzzle with just one phone call.
