Depends, but unless you are directly contracting with UP (i.e. paying for an entire container on a carriage) you should file a claim with the shipper, the compa

Depends, but unless you are directly contracting with UP (i.e. paying for an entire container on a carriage) you should file a claim with the shipper, the company that sent it. If they won't or can't help you, then talk to the intermediate shipping service, likely FexEx/UPS. With shipping stuff, the general rule of thumb is to start with the org closest to the customer, and then move up. Example: my sister had a new Dell latitude porch-pirated off her front steps. We first contacted Dell, and they sent her a new one. If they hadn't accepted it, we would have talked to FedEx next. Worst-case, you file a small-claims suit. The whole insurance process is then propagated up the organization stack behind the scenes. In the case of rail theft, its likely you may never know about it, you will just see a shipping delay for an indeterminate reason and be mildly annoyed. Think of how in code, you call methods from a class that may pass your call to a superclass, which passes the code to a super-superclass, etc. In aggregate, this will end up making insurance rates go up, which will ultimately get passed to the consumer as price increases (or shipping increases, but its more and more common for shipping to be "free" and instead hidden in the base item retail price), as others have mentioned. Not the greatest, but it is the reality of things.