Freight rate

A freight rate (historically and in ship chartering simply freight) is a price at which a certain cargo is delivered from one point to another. The price depends on the form of the cargo, the mode of transport (truck, ship, train, aircraft), the weight of the cargo, and the distance to the delivery destination. Many shipping services, especially air carriers, use dimensional weight for calculating the price, which takes into account both weight and volume of the cargo.

For example, bulk coal long-distance rates in America are approximately 1 cent/ton-mile. So a 100 car train, each carrying 100 tons, over a distance of 1000 miles, would cost $100,000. On the other hand, Intermodal container shipping rates depend heavily on the route taken over the weight of the cargo, just as long as the container weight does not exceed the maximum lading capacity. Prices can vary between $300-$10,000 per Twenty foot equivalent unit (TEU) depending on the supply and demand of a given route.

In ship chartering, freight is the price which a charterer pays a shipowner for the use of a ship in a voyage charter.

Freight Rate, the cost of transporting goods, is reflective of a number of factors aside from normal transportation costs. The main determining factors of freight rate are: mode of transportation (truck, ship, train, air craft), weight, size, distance, points of pickup and delivery, and the actual goods being shipped. One of the earliest forms of freight transportation was by water. Many of the earliest settlements were built along or near seacoasts and navigable inland waterways. As these settlements grew, roads and later railroads and pipelines had to be built to transport freight to and from the navigable waterways, thus connecting the inland points of pickup and delivery which could not be reached by navigable waterways. The development of roads, railroads, and even pipelines allowed for the expansion of settlements inland and away from water ways. Transportation by ships is very limited in nature. If there are no navigable waterways close to the pickup point and destination then a good will not be transported by a ship. Rarely is any good transported solely by ship; usually goods coming into ports by ship must be unloaded and transferred onto another mode of transportation i.e. truck or railcar for transportation to its final destination. With the expansion of railroad systems and the development of more efficient trucks, the transportation of freight by ships became less cost effective. Networks, of roads and train tracks which once carried freight from coastal and inland waterway ports to destinations which were not accessible by means of marine transportation, greatly expanded making freight transportation from port to port overland more efficient and more affordable than the marine transportation of freight.

...
Wikipedia