There are four major modes of transportation and they are: railroad, motor, air and water. Railroads are usually used for long distance and large quantity of goods. Those goods could be steel and coal. The reasons why shippers use railroad as a carrier for their product because the product does not need to be someplace very quickly, the product is low value, and the cost of railroad services relatively cheap. So from here we can say that cost of railroad service is relatively low, and transit time is long. Reliability of railroad is good because since railroads use rails, bad weather would not interrupt their journey. Capability of railroads is very good, since you can ship as much product as you want. Accessibility is very low, because in order to ship your product you first have deliver goods by another transport (such as truck) to the place where the loading place is and that is disadvantage of railroads. Using railroads, security must be considered, it depends on a product you ship. If the product can be easily damaged, the security cost is high. One example would be transferring cars, since rails road tracks are not a smooth ride, cars could have some damages.
2. Motor carrier is more expensive than railroad and water carriers, but cheaper that air carriers. It is mostly used for transferring foods. Transit time for motor is faster than water and railroad, because ones you load the product in the truck it goes straight to the final destination, where for railroad and water carriers they might have to stop at different locations. That is because they have higher volume of goods transferring and those goods could come from different shippers, therefore railroad carriers might need to stop at different locations to deliver those goods. Since motor carriers use highway roads to deliver goods, weather conditions play a huge role. If the weather is bad, such as in northern states snow falls, the delivery of goods will be delayed.