Multimodal transportation of goods is one of the methods of intermodal international transportation, which allows delivering goods over long distances to any country in the world using two or more modes of transport under one contract.
This type of delivery is also in demand in situations where there is no direct road connection between the point of departure and the point of destination (for example, countries are separated by water).
The term and cost of delivery depend on the chosen route and the transport used, the characteristics of the products being transported (weight, dimensions, etc.) and the presence of special conditions (for example, temperature conditions). The best in terms of terms is a combination of land and air transport, and in terms of price – multimodal transportation of goods by sea or rail
Due to the fact that multimodal transportation can be carried out by combining different modes of transport, their geography significantly exceeds any other types of cargo transportation. Usually, when organizing multimodal transportation, a combination of sea, rail and road transport is used. There are rare cases when air transport is included in the multimodal transportation, which is usually used for high-speed delivery of cargo or its delivery to remote geographical areas with which there is no other transport connection.
For the convenience of using multimodal transportation, they distinguish the main “shoulder” of the transportation of goods and the type of transport that is used in this case: rail and sea.