application
Between the truck, the train and the ship, as much as 30 to 70% of every multimodal journey disappears into a black box: yards, sidings, port stacks and vessel holds where conventional trackers go dark. Sensolus puts one autonomous tracker on the asset itself, so visibility follows the cargo across every leg and every mode.
A single multimodal shipment can change hands four to six times, from road to rail, rail to short-sea and back to road, and spend 30 to 70% of its transit time in places no one can see: rail sidings, port stacks, vessel holds. Infrastructure based tracking stops working the moment an asset leaves the road network, and each leg falls under a different legal regime, so when something goes wrong, no one can prove where.
The shift the industry is really after is optimodal: choosing the best combination of modes for each flow on cost, reliability and carbon. Yet companies keep defaulting to single mode road. Road freight has grown while rail and inland waterway have declined, held back less by cost than by operational fear: the worry of losing sight of goods the moment they leave the truck. The tracking economics have tipped and the ROI is clearly there. What closes the gap is evidence: showing teams their own data and handing back control.
"The real barrier to multimodal freight isn’t economic or regulatory. It’s operational visibility. Shippers already have the business case to move freight across road, rail, barge and short-sea. What stalls adoption is the inability to see the asset through the handover points where traditional systems go blind."
Multimodal freight doesn’t fail because tracking is hard on the road. It fails at the seams: the handovers between modes, the yards and holds with no infrastructure, the disputes no one can settle. Sensolus closes the gap on four fronts.
The tracker automatically detects whether the asset is on a truck, a train or a ship and adjusts its behaviour to match, with no device swaps, no manual reconfiguration and no visibility gaps at the handover.
Autonomous trackers keep reporting in rail sidings, port stacks and vessel holds, with no gateways, no Wi-Fi and no solar panels. Data recovery fills the dead zone gaps and syncs the moment signal returns.
Shock and condition monitoring logs the location, time, severity and orientation of every impact, so you can pinpoint the responsible leg and settle damage and insurance disputes with evidence, not guesswork.
Instead of stitching together each carrier’s partial view, you get one end-to-end record covering ETAs, dwell, demurrage, and utilisation, owned by the shipper and fed straight into your systems.
The same architecture, autonomous trackers with mode-aware battery management, solving three very different problems across real multimodal deployments.
A previous solution polled every 5 minutes and drained batteries within six months. Mode-switching ping rates, low on long rail and ocean legs, high on trucks and near delivery, extended battery life to years and delivered reliable last-mile ETAs across the whole fleet. The same data logs which transport mode carried each leg, feeding hub inventory optimisation and CO₂ evidence for customer tenders.
Goods kept arriving damaged with no idea where in the chain it happened. Weeks after equipping load carriers with trackers, shock events clustered at specific rail yards during wagon switching: 529 events recorded, 111 critical, roughly 80% at a single yard in one window. Unwinnable disputes became targeted intervention and evidence-based insurance talks.
Roll-on/roll-off cassettes and trailers circulated between ports with no reliable view of location or usage. Trackers on every carrier gave real-time inventory that prevents both the overstocking and the shortages that can halt port operations, balances the pool against upcoming sailings and catches unauthorised third-party use.
Want to see exactly how one tracker follows a load carrier across road, rail and sea? We walk through the whole thing in our multimodal webinar, now available on demand. In about 30 minutes our CEO, VP Engineering and Head of Sales Engineers show you a live tracker install, how the device adapts from truck to train to vessel hold, and a live demo of turning raw tracking data into an AI dashboard. It is the fastest way to understand the tech behind the results above, and you can watch it whenever it suits you.
Infrastructure-free deployment. One SIM across Europe and North America. Years of battery, not months. Everything else flows from these three.
Autonomous trackers keep reporting in yards, port stacks and vessel holds with no gateways, no wiring and no solar panels, the very places rivals need fixed infrastructure. Fitting one takes minutes: rivet it to the asset, activate it with a magnet, then scan a QR code to link it to the container ID. That way you deploy across a whole lane in days, not months.
Trackers roam across NB-IoT and LTE-M cellular coverage spanning Europe and North America, switching networks automatically as an asset crosses borders within those regions, with no SIM swaps and no per-country contracts. Data recovery fills short connectivity gaps so each leg stays close to continuous.
Mode-aware ping rates deliver 5 to 10 years per tracker, versus months on always-on premium trackers that force you to limit tracking to a pilot lane. No charging, no swaps: multimodal visibility that scales to the whole fleet.
The questions logistics managers, supply-chain directors and operations leads ask us most when they start closing the multimodal visibility gap.
Multimodal transport tracking means following a single asset continuously as it moves across different transport modes (truck, train and ship) with one device rather than a separate system for each leg. The goal is to remove the blind spots at the handovers between modes, where 30 to 70% of transit time otherwise disappears into a “black box”.
The tracker automatically detects the transport mode and adapts its behaviour, reporting roughly every 15 minutes on the road, every few hours on a long rail leg, and every 5 minutes near delivery. There are no device swaps or manual reconfiguration between legs, and that mode-aware rhythm is what lets a single battery last 5 to 10 years across a full multimodal journey.
No, not for the GPS smart trackers that follow assets across modes. They are autonomous and work out of the box over public low-power cellular and GPS networks (NB-IoT / LTE-M): no gateways, no receivers, no Wi-Fi and no solar panels, which is exactly why they work in yards, port stacks and vessel holds. Through dead zones the tracker keeps recording, and data recovery backfills the gaps and syncs the moment signal returns.
The one exception is zone-level location of the Bluetooth (BLE) location tags used on smaller assets inside a terminal: those are picked up by smart gateways installed at the site, or by an existing third-party device that acts as a smart gateway, such as a handheld RFID reader.
Yes. Shock and condition monitoring logs the location, time, severity and orientation of every impact, building an objective record you can use to pinpoint the responsible leg and partner. In one real deployment, trackers recorded 529 shock events, 111 of them critical, and showed roughly 80% concentrated at a single rail yard.
Near delivery the ping rate rises to every 5 minutes, giving accurate last-mile ETAs to the receiving team. Dwell and demurrage alerts flag assets that sit at a yard or port beyond their target, helping you catch bottlenecks early and avoid demurrage and detention charges.
Yes. Sensolus exposes location, journey, dwell-time and shock data through a REST API and can stream events to your TMS, ERP or supply-chain platform. Customers typically pipe real-time asset state into systems like SAP, Dynamics or Odoo via the open REST API and webhooks, so multimodal visibility shows up where planners already work.
Whether you're moving containers, RoRo carriers or high-value racks across road, rail and sea. Let's talk about what one continuous data stream could look like for your network.
Request demo© 2026 Sensolus - All rights reserved
