- I became a big fan of intermodalism during the 1990s when I ran Canada’s largest IMC (intermodal marketing company). Each time I wrote about this topic, I felt that the service was on the brink of making a major breakthrough in customer acceptance and market penetration. While intermodal activity has shown steady growth over the past 10 to 15 years, this mode of transport is still viewed as a niche market by some folks or a slow and unreliable mode by others.Intermodal’s ‘transformational’ decade