Coastal service is aimed to reduce the cost of logistics for the customers who are primarily using road, by offering multimodal transport by combining rail & sea with peripheral deliveries & pick up done by road. The prices of the multimodal combination using rail & sea can reduce the cost of transportation of goods from north to south india & vice versa by 40 – 50 % at comparable transit times.

Currently the multimodal transport operations are primarily done for heavy cargoes like marble, tiles, minerals, cotton etc. alone. Caravel has wide range of container offering - refrigerated containers to carry temperature controlled cargo like dairy products, fruits & vegetables, medicines, chemicals, tank containers - to carry liquid cargo, open top containers to carry goods which need to loaded from the top, flat rack containers – for bulky engineering products. All these goods from, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat etc. are primarily carried by trailers & trucks, which costs very high due to the involvement of special trucks & reposition cost of the special trucks. Apart from this, there is a requirement of road width in the case of bulky cargo. Carriage of these cargo by ship can make the transit faster & easier. Temperature controlled cargo can be carried from door to port by power pack to the container on the trailers then power at port & ship to ensure that the cargo does not deteriorate. This kind of power arrangement is more reliable. The shippers for these cargoes are yet to use the multimodal transport in a large way, we intend to have these products moving in multimodal ways.

Coastal service will reduce the pressure on the road by reducing pollution & cost for the shippers, lesser congestion on the roads as well. The transit time from origin to destination can be comparable to road as we are intending to join rail & sea primarily as they are the cheaper mode of transport where ship transport being the cheapest of the 3 surface/sea mode.

Currently car carriers are of very high bodies to accommodate more cars for economical carriage. This is less stable, not complying the road rule, making the movement more cumbersome due to low speed & height making it dangerous. We are intending to load these in 40’ Hi cube boxes which is more safer than the high body road auto carrying trucks/trailers. The containers after loading the car will be moved to the port by rail, then by sea to the south Indian location for delivery & vice versa. In this way, peripheral pick or delivery alone will be done by road. This makes the transport more safer. Apart from cars, there are various road vehicles like two wheelers, autos etc. can move by this multimodal & more safer, rule compliant method of transportation.