【正文】
ads are rising to the challenge by proposing new types of services and enhanced performances. Thus, NorthAmerican railroads have created intermodal subdivisions that operate socalled landbridges providing efficient container transportation by long, doublestack train between the East and the West coasts and between these ports and the industrial core of the continent (socalled mini land bridges). Most NorthAmerican railroads are now enforcing some form of scheduled service. In Europe, where congestion has long forced the scheduling of trains, the separation of the infrastructure ownership from service providing increases the petition and favors the emergence of new carriers and services. Moreover, the expansion of the Community to the east provides the opportunity to introduce new services that avoid the overcongested parts of the European work. New container and trailerdedicated shuttletrain works are thus being created within the European Community. The planning and management processes of these new railroadbased intermodal systems and operations are generally no different from those of traditional systems in terms of issues and goals, profitability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. The new operating policies introduce, however, elements and requirements into the planning processes which, from an Operations Research point of view, require that models be revisited and appropriate methods be devised. This paper aims to discuss some of these issues and developments. It focuses on the tactical planning of rail intermodal services in North America and Europe and is based on a number of observations and ongoing projects. Its goal is to be informative, point to challenges, and identify opportunities for research aimed at both methodological developments and actual applications. 2 Intermodal and RailBased Transportation Many transportation systems are multimodal, their infrastructure supporting various transportation modes, such as truck, rail, air, and ocean/river navigation, carriers operating and offering transportation services on these modes. Then, broadly defined, intermodal transportation refers to the transportation of people or freight from their origin to their destination by a sequence of at least two transportation modes. Transfers from one mode to the other are performed at intermodal terminals, which may be a sea