Metamor City, like any large metropolis, requires large amounts of supplies on a daily basis — and also produces large volumes of exports and a great deal of waste. Moving stuff into, around and out of the city is an effort that requires a multifaceted approach.
Inside the City
Within the city, cargo and trash are moved around at Street level in large ground-trucks, much like you would see in any modern town (though most do not use internal-combustion engines, due to air pollution concerns). Supplies are transported vertically in cargo elevators and waste chutes. Most garbage is recycled somewhere within city limits, and the remainder is either annihilated magically or shipped out to disposal sites. Organic waste is processed into fertilizer and sent back to the farming communities that grow the food.
When more direct transportation of goods between high-level skyways is required, skimmer-trucks and cargo tenders are used. The latter is a kind of miniature skyship — too large for the skyways, but maneuverable enough to get close enough to the towers for direct on-loading and off-loading of merchandise. They often have large, articulated manipulator arms for picking up cargo containers and moving them around. These tenders have to be registered with the city as air traffic, and carry transponders to allow their movements to be tracked. The largest ones can carry as much as three or four semi-trucks. In addition to ferrying loads of cargo between platforms, they are also used in loading and unloading skyships at the docking platforms.
By Sea
Metamor City itself is landlocked, and widening the Metamor River into a channel big enough to handle shipping traffic would have been impractical and ecologically destructive. Instead, Metamor continues to receive shipping as it always has, at the nearby port-city of Menth.
Menth doesn't have the layer-cake structure of Metamor City proper, but it has become quite a busy city in its own right. Maglev trains move people and cargo back and forth between the ports and Metamor City. Some additional shipping traffic comes in at Meriton, formerly Sorin, though the latter city is better known nowadays as the birthplace of the Meraist Church.
By Tube
Maglev trains don't actually have "rails", but a great deal of cargo is carried in on them in any case. This is generally very dense cargo that must be transported across land, and would weigh down the skyships too much for air travel: ore, steel, stone, gravel, etc. Pressurized liquids and gases are also transported in this fashion — true, the tubes themselves are low-pressure, but the trains are at atmospheric pressure on the inside, even in the cargo holds (unlike a skyship). There are train stations throughout the city, a few of which are equipped for handling industrial cargo; these, of course, are all at Street-level.
By Air
Skyships are used for moving relatively light cargo, or at least cargo that's light with respect to its volume — the Feather Weight enchantments can only counteract so much, after all. They're also especially good for moving highly perishable items. Meat, produce, grain, furniture and electronics are all common cargo on the skyships. All of the major skyship docking platforms are equipped with cranes and cargo tenders to assist in offloading freight.
