Right you are, txxxxx. And not just places with few roads, I should think. Turbine blades for a lot of the U.S. Midwest come across the Atlantic on specialized cargo ships, up the St Lawrence, through Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior and get loaded on outsize road convoys at Duluth.
Wind turbine blades again - Duluth Shipping News | Duluth Shipping News
This is both slow and awesomely expensive and furthermore is ice-blocked for several months per year.
Outsize air freight, meanwhile, is an area where you don't go unless you absolutely have to, because the An-124 operators have over a barrel. Less costly outsize, point-to-point, would sell for certain. Even Airbus' operation hasn't led to a commercial-market follow-on - I suspect that it makes sense for them only because the cost of road convoys in Europe is horrendous.
LJ's jet freight works for high-value items like airplane wings and high-unit-revenue things like FedEx parcels, but there's still a big gap between air and intermodal surface that airplanes have never filled.
And about that DreamLifter: Boeing's cost to build that one aircraft was more than the LEMV program bill, which developed the first of a new type of aircraft, flew it, and also included a complete and new-technology ISR suite.