Intermodal Transport Editing and Proofreading Services

A container arrives at the consignee with a crushed corner. It travelled by road to a terminal, by rail across the country, by road again to the door. Three parties handled it, each has an interchange record, and each record says the unit was received in apparent good order. One of those records is wrong, or the damage happened at a point nobody wrote down. The claim will be paid by whoever documented their handover worst.

We edit what intermodal operators and their customers produce — equipment interchange receipts and handover records, inspection and condition report formats, terminal operating procedures, service descriptions and door-to-door quotations, damage and shortage claims documentation, subcontractor agreements and instructions, and the correspondence between modes when a unit goes wrong. Our editors work on the record made in the ninety seconds a unit changes hands.

The interchange record is what decides which mode pays for damage, and its failure is a signature under the words apparent good order. Apparent good order is a phrase people sign without looking. We work through these so the inspection is specified as a sequence rather than an outcome — which faces, which corners, roof, underside if visible, doors closed and doors open — since a driver who is not told what to look at looks at the side nearest to them; so any damage is described by position using a fixed convention, given that nearside and offside reverse depending on which way the unit is facing and a photograph with no reference point locates nothing; so pre-existing damage carried forward from the previous leg is recorded explicitly as pre-existing, because the second party to notice a dent is the one who gets blamed; so the exact point of transfer is stated as a place and a time rather than as a stage of the journey, as liability changes hands at a location; so seal numbers are read and written rather than confirmed as intact, since a seal that is intact and different is the whole case; so the record names who inspected rather than who signed; and so a refusal or a clausing has somewhere to go on the form. Records written this way settle claims in days.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including interchange records, claims files and commercial terms. We are editors rather than intermodal, insurance or claims specialists, and we offer no view on liability, damage or any claim. What we can do is make the handover show where the unit changed hands and in what state.