An education campaign
How intermodal was really built — and how the IMCs are taking it back.
Before the apps and the asset empires, there were IMCs. They invented the door-to-door container move, and for decades they were intermodal. This is their story — the history, the naming fight, the fall, and the comeback. It is also the reason RateFlex exists.
Chapter 1 — The 1980s
The railroads wanted intermodal volume, but they had no interest in becoming freight sales organizations. Running trains was their business. Selling door-to-door freight to thousands of individual shippers was not.
The gap
Shippers didn't want to buy rail lane by lane with fragmented billing across railroads, dray carriers, and equipment providers. The railroads didn't want to sell it that way either. Nobody bridged the gap — yet.
Early–mid 1980s
The IMCs emerge as the bridge. Railroads run the trains. IMCs sell the door-to-door move: they bundle rail and dray into one offering, take pricing risk, issue a single invoice, and shield the railroad from shipper service complexity.
The name was honest
"Intermodal Marketing Company" was accurate at the time. They marketed rail intermodal capacity as a door-to-door product. They weren't carriers in the trucking sense. They were the sales arm that made intermodal real.
Chapter 2
Today, shippers hear "marketing" and think middleman. Then comes the question: "You're just another broker, right?" — followed by five minutes of explanation on every first call.
InTek Intermodal Logistics CEO Rick LaGore calls it the IMC tax: the five-minute vocabulary lesson every new shipper requires before you can talk about service or price. IANA president Anne Reinke agrees — when the nomenclature needs explaining, you lose people. The industry is now debating a rename. The leading idea: swap one letter and become ILC — Intermodal Logistics Company.
That's not marketing. That's end-to-end transportation management. The job outgrew the name.
Chapter 3 — The 1990s
IMCs existed before the 53-foot box. In the 1980s they sold 40s and 48s. The service worked — but it wasn't truly truck-competitive.
The 1980s
IMCs validate the commercial model. Their success proves there is a real market for truck-like intermodal.
Early–mid 1990s
The 53-foot domestic container arrives. Truckload-compatible dimensions. Double-stack rail economics. By the late 1990s it becomes the U.S. standard.
The product matures
Intermodal becomes a legitimate truckload conversion product: comparable dimensions, competitive transit, meaningful savings. The job gets bigger — network engineering, visibility, accessorial control. The name stays "Marketing Company."
IMCs validated the model. The 53-footer perfected the product. The name never caught up.
Chapter 4
Then came the integrated giants: their own trucks, their own containers, their own rail contracts — and enough freight volume to drop rates the IMCs couldn't match.
The pattern repeated across the industry. Take one major shipper account: a drop pool at a single facility, managed across five IMCs. One by one, the lanes went away. The giant had the assets and the rail rates normally reserved for IMCs. The five IMCs lost it lane by lane.
For the draymen caught in the middle, the choice was stark: become a bottom-of-the-barrel outsourced trucker for the giants — or build the comeback. The comeback is Chapter 5.
Chapter 5
One IMC can't match a giant. A connected network of IMCs is a very different story. That is why RateFlex was built.
RateFlex connects independent IMCs through basic shared data — city and state, equipment type, rail, date and time. No customer names. No facility names. The network sees both sides of every empty move and finds the street turn: one company's inbound unload becomes another company's outbound load.
Load→Empty becomes Load→Load. A delivery with a reload pays the drayman a full roundtrip plus half — the industry's "double bubble." IMCs save through credits on both sides. Volume makes everyone whole. Nobody feels robbed.
Value Created Is Shared.
Chapter 6
This history is being told episode by episode — video explainers, posts, and essays drawn from people who lived it. These chapters are also the outline of a coming ebook on the real history of intermodal. Follow along: