Shipping routes

Are there sources for determining the shipping routes between any two cities for FedEx and for UPS?
It seems that those in the biz of shipping their wines out around the country have a fair amount of info as to ground shipping routes, which may go by rail, where a wine shipment might “spend a leisurely weekend stopover”, etc. I am just wondering if there are comprehensive sources for this information online so that those of us consumers who are watching the temperatures in the Spring and Fall might make more educated decisions.

You would think. I tried finding information on shipping routes a couple of years ago. Made numerous phone calls to FedEx and UPS and got nowhere. Either they don’t know or aren’t talking. Good luck. I’m interested in what others have to say about this.

I think it’s similar to fracking fluids: companies do not want to let out a “trade secret” even though pretty much every company and his brother know what ranges of chemicals are used, but these can only be guesses until they are verified (or mandated by Federal law). I doubt packages are left leisurely about anywhere along the line, but this also doesn’t mean it takes the most ‘direct’ route either. I am sure there are many considerations: traffic tie ups, cost of transportation, amount of goods being shipped on certain paths, etc. Basically, it will get sent along the cheapest, fastest enough (hey, shipping companies usually don’t give 2nd-day service to ground customers!) route.

If you have ever tracked previous wine shipments it becomes evident what routes are used from certain areas. For me there are two distinct routes used from California to Denver. One for shipments from the Central Coast and one for Northern CA shipments.

They definitely don’t always take the most direct route: I’ve had shipments from California go all the way to Kentucky (next door state) then reverse course and head up to Minnesota before heading back to Virginia. Seems counter intuitive but I guess there’s some shipper’s logic to it.

It’s like the airlines. They ship from smaller hubs to a larger depot and then from there figure out which large area it’s going to, send it to a hub there and then local. The algorithms are pretty complicated but they want the trucks as full as possible with the fewest number of stops. FedEx once did a demo for us because they were bidding on a way to plan bus routing. They wouldn’t release their proprietary info though. But if you do a lot of point to point shipping from the same two points, you can usually figure out the route your package will take.

But they will never commit to a particular route. Among other reasons, it would open up several liability issues that they’re not going to accept.

UPS does not guarantee shipping routes. In general packages to certain parts of the country from certain parts of the country will go a certain route. But they might not. That’s about as much as you get from them.

How about how we can figure out what “hot spots” to track temps for when considering ground shipping? In my case, although I buy occasionally from the East coast and from a couple places between the coasts, most of my purchases would come from northern or southern CA to be shipped to Seattle.
I have been told that shipments from No. Cal would go through Redding as a “hot spot”, and shipments from So. Cal would go through Anaheim as a “hot spot” followed by Redding, and that these are the important temps to track.

Having read a recent post here by Emily, I think it was, at a winery that ships her wine all across the country, she and others at other wineries in CA seem to know a great deal about variable shipping routes, weekend layovers, etc. that would be very useful to gather in some way.

I posted some info on grounding shipping routes in a thread last year. If it’s going from the West Coast to east of the Mississippi, it will go in container by rail. As anyone who subscribes to Trains magazine can tell you, there are basic routes:

Seattle/Portland to Chicago via BNSF
Oakland/SF to Chicago via Cheyenne or Denver via Union Pacific
Oakland/SF to Chicago via SoCal and Arizona via BNSF
SoCal to St. Louis/Chicago via the Southwest via BNSF
SoCal to Chicago via Las Vegas on UP

Each shipper has a primary rail contractor, as I recall, so that will likely determine which route it goes.

You can use the carrier websites to determine how many days it is between shipping points. That will help you determine if any weekend layovers are possible.
I know for my shipments from California, as long as they ship by Tuesday, they will not have to spend a weekend anywhere unless there are delays.

Greg pretty much hit the nail on the head.

As I mentioned before, I am a FedEx Employee so for the sake of argument this really pertains mostly to FedEx. While UPS is very similar, they use rail for most of their Ground linehaul so it’s slightly different.

Ground routes are constantly changing in order to shave off days in transit in various lanes. FedEx Ground has local stations, Hubs, Satellites, Super Satellites and even outbound only sort centers. As density builds in certain lanes, they will do direct loads if at all possible to reduce transit days and speed things up. This is a key driving force in the industry.

So if you have a shipment going from Idaho to New Mexico, it’s quite likely there isn’t a ton of shipping in this lane so that package will likely hit a couple of hubs so the routes have the required density.

But, if you’re shipping a package from Fontana CA to Newark NJ… there is probably a TON of packages going this way and it’s quite likely that there will be a direct load from SoCal to Newark that will never hit a hub while in transit.

Make sense?

Can anyone hazard a guess on the route from LA to Minneapolis? That’s were most of my wine comes from? I won’t hold you to it’s correctness.

Dynamic load leveling.

Here is the shipping route for UPS 2 day air from Chicago to Orange County, CA.

Day 1: Pickup in Chicago —> drive to Indianapolis, IN
Day 2: Arrives in Indianapolis, IN by 4am —> Drive from Indianapolis to Louisville, KY by 4pm —> Loaded and flown to San Diego, CA —> Arrives in San Diego, CA by 6pm PST —> Drive from San Diego, CA to Aliso Viejo by 10pm
Day 3: Delivery in Orange County by End of Day.

Hope this helps you guys look through multi-city weather for those looking to ship 2 day air from chi town to OC

-Juyuan

Now if I could get the routes from NYC, Chicago, DC, LA, etc. to Seattle for both FedEx and UPS by ground and by air I would be set!

As anyone who subscribes to Trains magazine can tell you, there are basic routes:

And who doesn’t? Sheesh. Just look it up in the last issue.

You continue to amaze me John!

Robert - what are you trying to understand? So you get something shipped from say, LA to Seattle. Do you have any idea how it got to LA? How about this:

Loaded on a pallet at the winery. Put on a truck and taken to a larger city (most wineries are in small towns). Sits at the larger city for a few days to weeks. With luck, maybe in cold conditions but not necessarily in pristine conditions. From that warehouse it’s put on another truck and taken to the dockyard or to another place for loading onto a container. Container is taken to the dockyard. Sits there for a little while and gets loaded onto a ship. Maybe you have an insulated container, maybe a refrigerated one, but probably just a regular old container. Get it below the water line if you can.

Then it arrives in the US, say to NC or NJ. The container is taken off the boat and put onto the dockyard. Everything has to clear customs. It may be broken down there or more likely will be delivered somewhere else at which point it will be broken down. The wine then goes to a warehouse. A distributor in LA calls up and orders a pallet or two. It gets put on a truck at the warehouse. That truck goes to a bunch of other importers and picks up additional pallets over the next few days, taking them back to a central location. When there are enough pallets to ship out west, they’re all loaded onto a truck and it heads out west. Maybe that carrier has a central hub in Salt Lake City so the truck goes there. Some stuff is going to LA, some to Denver, some to Seattle and so on. The wine gets transferred to a truck heading to the warehouse of a distributor who serves LA. That warehouse may not be anywhere close to LA though, maybe it’s in NV where land is cheaper. The store in LA orders a few cases and those get loaded onto another truck with other wines for other deliveries and one by one they get dropped off at the various retailers along the route that day.

Then you see it online in LA and order a couple bottles to be shipped up to Seattle.

That’s where your tracking concern commences. I would imagine that your curiosity is pretty much academic, right?

As for spring and fall shipping, if you’re shipping coast to coast by ground, it will cross mountains. It might be 80 degrees on the plain and snowing in the mountains. And if you’re buying anything from S. Africa, S. America, Australia, New Zealand, or anywhere in the southern hemisphere, it’s crossed the equator. No matter what time of year. And who knows what the weather was like on the docks.

Of course if you order CA wines, the particulars might differ. They probably wouldn’t have been shipped by boat, although one never knows.

OK, beer it is then.

Well at least you can open a local craft brewery almost anywhere!

But you raise an issue though. We can ship cheese and chocolate and even fish all over the world but we treat wine like a ream of paper.

There’s not a lot of ocean shipping in July/August, but the season starts up fast in September and there are days in September that are every bit as hot. And worse, wine stores get delivery 12 months of the year but ask them how many suppliers are delivering in refrigerated trucks.

And then you have stores like one I used to sell wine to. The owner pointed to the open door and said he got calls from people asking if he had a cooling system. “Of course,” he would reply, looking at the door. In July it was pretty hot in that place.

I have no idea why we can ensure that cheese stays cools from source to consumer but we can’t do it for wine.

Greg,
Your point is well taken. And yet, knowing that, would you still ship ground from LA to Seattle through Anaheim and Redding in July and August when the temps may be over 100 degrees, and perhaps be ok shipping out on a Friday so it has a chance to rest in Anaheim over the weekend?