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s 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 port or an inland terminal, ., rail yards, river ports, airports, etc. Although both people and freight can be transported using an intermodal chain, in this paper, we focus on the latter. The fundamental idea of intermodal transportation is to consolidate loads for efficient longhaul transportation performed by large ocean vessels and, on land, mostly by rail and truck. Local pickup and delivery is usually performed by truck. Mostly of the freight intermodal transportation is performed by using containers. Intermodal transportation is not restricted, however, to containers and intercontinental exchanges. For instance, the transportation of express