Shipping an oversize load costs more than shipping cargo that fits in a conventional ocean container. That’s just a fact of life.
But the more you know about how the cost of oversize shipping adds up, the more easily you can find ways to shave some dollars off the total.
Let’s look at the factors that add expense to an oversize shipment:
When the item you ship is too tall or wide for a regular shipping container, that’s called out of gauge, or oversize, cargo.
Just as out of gauge freight doesn’t fit neatly into a box, out of gauge transport doesn’t fit into a simple process. This kind of international shipping comes with complicated challenges. So it takes special skill and experience to manage a successful transit.
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.
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.
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.
You wouldn’t put on flip-flops to climb a mountain or go running with size-12 sneakers on your size-10 feet. Ocean containers are a bit like shoes: you need the right kind, and the right size, for your specific purpose.
There’s no getting around it: cargo that doesn’t fit in a container costs more to ship than cargo that does. Transporting out of gauge cargo globally is also a more complicated process than shipping a steel box.
But if you do things right, you can control the cost of shipping oversized cargo, and also avoid some significant headaches.
