Haulage is the business of transporting goods by road or rail between suppliers and large consumer outlets, factories, warehouses, or depots. This includes everything humans might wish to move in bulk – from vegetables and other foodstuffs, to clothes, ore,

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

, and other supplies. Haulage also involves the transportation of chemicals in large sealed containers, and the removal of

waste Waste are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor Value (economics), economic value. A wast ...

. As the word implies, goods are loaded into large trailers or carriages and hauled between different locations. Traditionally, this was by large animals such as horses or oxen – where the practice may also be called cartage or drayage. However, in the modern age, this act is mostly performed by trains or trucks – with large shipping vessels acting as intermediaries for crossing oceans. Truck drivers on haulage shifts are typically male, and often work long and difficult hours with few breaks – regularly sleeping in their vehicles overnight and eating/showering at rest stops. It is expected that

Vehicular automation Vehicular automation is using technology to assist or replace the operator of a vehicle such as a car, truck, aircraft, rocket, military vehicle, or boat. Assisted vehicles are ''semi-autonomous'', whereas vehicles that can travel without a ...

will largely render human drivers obsolete within a few decades. Haulage is also known as 'horizontal transport'. This contrasts with 'vertical transport' of the same such materials with cranes, known as hoisting.

Cost

Haulage fees, sometimes also simply called haulage, include the charges made for hauling

freight In transportation, cargo refers to goods transported by land, water or air, while freight refers to its conveyance. In economics, freight refers to goods transported at a freight rate for commercial gain. The term cargo is also used in ...

on carts, drays, lorries, or

truck A truck or lorry is a motor vehicle designed to transport freight, carry specialized payloads, or perform other utilitarian work. Trucks vary greatly in size, power, and configuration, but the vast majority feature body-on-frame construct ...

s, and is incorporated for example in the cost of loading raw ore at a mine site and transporting it to a processing plant. A

railway Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport using wheeled vehicles running in railway track, tracks, which usually consist of two parallel steel railway track, rails. Rail transport is one of the two primary means of ...

, supplying cars, may negotiate rates with customers located on another railway's line, the road granting haulage rights. This differs from trackage rights in that the host railway operates the trains for the other railway, where with trackage rights, the secondary railway operates trains over the host's tracking.

References

Blaszak, Michael W. "ABC's of Railroading: Trackage and Haulage Rights," ''Trains'', 1 May 2006, accessed 30 August 2011.
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120920014201/http://trn.trains.com/en/Railroad%20Reference/ABCs%20of%20Railroading/2006/05/Trackage%20and%20haulage%20rights.aspx , date=20 September 2012 Freight transport

Cost

See also

References