Shipment modes
Ground Freight Shipping: Highway, Rail Drayage, and Regional Runs
Ground freight shipping is surface transportation: truck linehaul, regional LTL, and the rubber that bookends intermodal. It is not a parcel “Ground” button.
Updated 2026-08-20 · ground freight shipping
Ground freight shipping, in a shipper’s mouth, usually means “not air.” That can be a 53-foot FTL, an LTL network, a box truck on a city run, or the truck that pulls a container to and from a rail ramp. The word is a category, not a tariff.
COL Freight Solutions prices the surface option that fits the cargo. If you say ground freight shipping and mean UPS Ground, you are on the wrong site. If you mean pallets on rubber—or rubber plus rail—we will quote that.
Ground freight shipping versus parcel Ground
Parcel Ground is a zone product with a label. Ground freight is a BOL product with class or a contracted FTL. Mixing the two in an RFP produces numbers that cannot be compared.
When a 3PL says they “do ground,” ask which: LTL, FTL, or small package. COL’s ground is commercial freight.
What sits inside the surface category
Highway FTL and LTL are the volume. Intermodal is ground in the sense that it never leaves the surface, even when the long haul is rail. Drayage is ground even when the box came off a ship.
Regional runs and dedicated routes are still ground freight shipping with a different commercial wrapper: often more schedule, less spot.
Speed is a range on the ground too
Ground is not automatically slow. A team FTL can outrun deferred air door-to-door on some lanes. LTL can look slow because of terminals, not because the tractor cannot drive.
Ask COL for a transit window on ground freight shipping for your pair of cities. Do not steal an air cutoff and paste it on a van.
Mexico ground is still ground—with different permits
Mexican federal highways, casetas, and who is allowed to pull the inland segment are ground problems. So is a patio that only receives in the morning. COL’s bilingual desk treats that as operations, not as a footnote to a U.S. quote.
Do not assume a U.S. ground contract covers a Mexican tractor. We will name the legs.
Put a surface quote on the calendar
Send origin, destination, equipment, and whether air is even in the conversation. Request ground freight shipping as the baseline and we will say if rail or highway is the better surface tool.
561-880-9808. Ground cadence is also what cost-recovery conversations are built on—air exceptions do not usually qualify a program by themselves.
