The problem is that railroads post 1960's struggled to compete with trucks in the less-than-carload freight arena. If you're a low volume shipper, you won't find any coast savings going to the effort of putting your container onto a train, now if you had multiple containers reliably going between the same origin and destination than it starts to make sense. The same basic logic applies to freight traffic shipped in rail cars (box cars, hoppers, tank cars, etc). To borrow from another railroad forum "Anything not going by truck already with the advent of cheap trucking, and still going through some sort of railroad freight house, containerization took care of. There was no reason to put it on a truck, then offload that at a freight house, load that onto a car, offload that at destination, load that back into a trailer, then deliver -- when you could just drop the trailer onto a train."