Conventional freight is booked against available capacity: a container slot, a truck, a flight. Project cargo is planned against constraints — bridge heights, road weight limits, crane reach, vessel deck strength — and those constraints have to be resolved before a booking is ever made. That reversal of sequence is the single biggest difference, and it's the reason project logistics operates as a planning discipline rather than a booking transaction.
Take a piece of turbine equipment moving from a UK manufacturing site to a coastal port twenty miles away. On paper, that sounds like the easy leg of the journey. In practice, it can be the part that takes longest to plan, because every bridge, roundabout and overhead cable on the route has to be individually checked against the load's exact dimensions. A single low bridge two miles from the factory can force a route that adds four hours and a police escort.
This is why route surveys and abnormal load permit applications often begin months before a single component is loaded. The survey isn't a formality — it produces the actual routing decision, and that decision determines which port the cargo can realistically reach, which in turn determines vessel options and sailing schedules. Get the survey wrong or start it late, and everything downstream has to be replanned.
The maritime leg introduces its own version of the same problem. A conventional container ship has standardised cell guides and lifting points. Project cargo often needs a vessel with sufficient deck strength, crane capacity, or open deck space for a specific piece — which can mean chartering rather than booking a liner slot, and chartering runs on a completely different timeline than container shipping.
What this means in practice for a client is that the planning conversation has to start earlier than it feels like it should. A project cargo move that looks six weeks away on the calendar may already be behind schedule if the route survey hasn't started, because permits, escorts and specialist equipment all have lead times measured in weeks, not days.
Getting this sequence right is what prevents the costly surprises that conventional freight rarely encounters: a bridge that won't clear, a berth that can't take the draft, a crane that isn't rated for the load. None of those are unsolvable problems — but they're far cheaper to solve in a planning document than on the morning of mobilisation.
