Port Everglades drayage

The interstate ends at the gate

I-595 runs east and stops at Port Everglades. The Eller Drive Overpass carries it to the port entrance, and domestic trucks have their own entrance underneath it. The overpass was built to take the road over the rail tracks into the container transfer facility, so nothing sits waiting at a crossing.

No city streets, no downtown, no bridge. For a straightforward container move this is the easiest port to get in and out of in South Florida, and it is the plain contrast with the routing an oversized load faces off PortMiami.

Depth is the real limitation here

The channel is 42 feet. PortMiami is 50. Deepening Port Everglades to 48 feet was authorized by Congress in December 2016 and has still not been built, and as recently as August 2026 the largest ship ever to call here came in lightly loaded because of it.

That matters to you in one situation, and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting you find out from a schedule: if your cargo is coming on one of the largest vessels, it is more likely to route through Miami. If you are asking us which port to book, that is the honest answer, and we pull from both.

What your driver needs at the gate

A TWIC and a Port Everglades ID badge. The badge is required by Florida statute rather than by port preference, and it is a separate credential from the PortMiami card. A driver cleared for one port is not automatically cleared for the other, which is the kind of thing that costs a day when nobody checks first.

Where it slows down

Appointments, the same as Miami, but the exception here is worth knowing: of the terminals at Port Everglades, only King Ocean has no appointment system. FIT, PET, Crowley and MSC all book slots, and no amount of urgency creates a slot that is not there.

Gates run 8 to 5. Our dispatch answers around the clock, which is not the same thing: send a container number at 11pm and you will get an answer, but the box does not move until the gate opens.

FIT sometimes opens on a Saturday, and when it does we can pull on it. The schedule is the terminal's call rather than a fixed one, so we check before the weekend and tell you either way, which is worth having on Friday if your last free day falls on a Monday. For a Saturday you can plan around, there is Seaboard at PortMiami, which runs a fixed Saturday gate until 2, and we pull from there too.

Rail and reefer

The FEC facility here is near dock, 43 acres beside the port, and it replaced a 12-acre yard two miles away. PortMiami's rail is on dock. Both work, and the difference shows up in the drayage leg rather than the rail leg.

There are more than 2,000 reefer outlets across the port, so this is a practical place to bring temperature-controlled freight in. If you are running reefer, tell us at the quote: it changes the chassis and it adds a genset.