Rail News

Retail giants Walmart and Amazon have entered into conversations directly with Class I railroads to enter in service agreements, bucking the historical structure in which shippers are required to use intermediaries to procure space.

BNSF Railway, Norfolk Southern, and CSX say domestic intermodal contract rates have risen by upper single-digit percentages in the first quarter, but some non-asset intermodal marketing companies tell quite a different story.

The costs of climate change and impacts to business are typically discussed as abstract and distant, but a review of recent history shows those costs are already here, and climbing.

Coastal transshipment at Indian ports has grown considerably since the relaxation of cabotage rules, but detractors argue that privately operated minor ports have reaped more of the benefits than their publicly run counterparts.

Historically, intermodal rail has offered a slower, lower-cost option for shippers, but with truckload prices falling, intermodal rail is now more expensive than trucking in some secondary markets.

Union Pacific Railroad will be closing the Global III terminal northwest of Chicago as part of its precision scheduled railroading operations in a shakeup that will send domestic intermodal volumes to Global II and international traffic to Global IV.

Canadian National is the latest Class I railroad to launch a mobile application for truck drivers to move more quickly through intermodal terminals by submitting documents ahead of time.

Two inland ports tied to the Port of New York and New Jersey by rail could help get trucks off the road but, if completed, they won’t alleviate storage pressure expected to rise as the port grows its discretionary rail volume to the Midwest.

Norfolk Southern saw big gains in international containers in the first quarter, but the railroad rejects the idea of domestic intermodal weakness in 2019 and is confident that rail pricing won’t be challenged by a much looser truck market.

India’s largest freight rail operator will maintain its current pricing through March 31, 2020, as part of a greater effort to encourage containerized rail movements throughout the country.

Applications are now being accepted for $900 million in USDOT BUILD grants for the upcoming fiscal year, a 40 percent reduction from the $1.5 billion made available last year for port, road, and rail projects.

Kansas City Southern referred to congestion in Houston as a smaller version of Chicago gridlock, while acknowledging coordination with Union Pacific Railroad needs to be better and precision scheduled railroading could help.

Slowing international growth and declining domestic volume in the first quarter point to the worst performance in intermodal since the freight recession ended in late 2016.

Kansas City Southern (KCS) reported a decline in first-quarter intermodal volumes due to the teacher blockade that stopped cargo going in and out of the port of Lazaro Cardenas by rail.

Intermodal volume will be down for many of the Class I railroads and trucking companies providing intermodal service, and although weather is an excuse, larger questions remain about the sector in the short and long term.

The UK freight transport industry will need government support if any real advances are to be made in decarbonizing the supply chain.

North American intermodal volume ended the first quarter worse than initially forecast due to changing shipping patterns and flooding in the Midwest, but there are signs that this is an inflection point to a difficult 2019 and not a fleeting blip.

Ohio-based intermodal services company COFC Logistics is launching two intermodal services that will move 53-foot containers northbound from Mexico City as trucking capacity tightens and cargo volumes increase.

Rising cargo volumes, growing manufacturing heft, and some new trade agreements are positioning Mexico as a logistics hub, raising questions about whether the country's infrastructure can handle the added stress.

CSX has shown signs of better service under the PSR model, but shippers and analysts say there are still important performance benchmarks PSR railroads in the US have not yet achieved.

After a nationwide trucker strike last May, transportation providers like Maersk and Brazilian railroad Brado are taking a multimodal approach to avoid becoming overly dependent on a volatile trucking market.

It was rail versus road last week in the European Parliament, where proposals from the two sectors met with two very different results.

Union talks with management at the UK’s market leading rail freight company are under way to avoid a strike that could bring the rail cargo business to a standstill.

Domestic intermodal volume will decline on a quarterly basis for the first time since 2016 to begin this year, but it’s still unclear whether the drop in shipments is a worrisome trend or a result of comparisons to an extraordinary 2018.

Although the 2018 imports and intermodal shipments were inflated somewhat due to the tariffs, the 10-year trend has been increased transloading of imports to domestic containers in Southern California.

As a multi-state region is devastated by historic flooding, shippers are rerouting, delaying cargo until waters recede and the full impact on truck capacity becomes clear.

All empty and loaded containers are being embargoed from three Union Pacific Railroad terminals due to a shortage of railcars, the second such shortage in the last three weeks.

Should shipment volumes of privately owned domestic containers continue to outpace those of rail-owned units, it will have major implications for the future of non-asset intermodal retailers.

Port authorities in the US Southeast have opened up inland ports in recent years to eliminate mutli-hour drays, free up truck capacity, and raise driver productivity.

CSX Transportation is requiring shippers to book reservations for their truckers to return empty containers or drop off loaded boxes, which has gone smoothly in smaller markets but caused major concerns in Chicago, Memphis, and Nashville.

The French ocean carrier’s latest intermodal offering aligns with its strategic goal of offering more integrated supply chain services, as well as an Indian government goal to convert more container cargo from truck to rail.

Dallas cargo owners will lose a rail option to Houston in late April

Shippers using the inland container depot to store empty containers will now be subject to an additional $6 per day charge.

The state has revived a project to raise the ceiling of CSX's Howard Street Tunnel to and from the Port of Baltimore in an effort to attract more Midwest cargo.

APL is taking its expedited EXX service from Shanghai to LA, guaranteeing rapid rail delivery to key inland hubs despite congestion at West Coast ports and on intermodal rail routes.

With blank sailings kicking in and congestion at Chicago rail yards easing, terminal operators in LA-LB say they have turned the corner and they see end of congestion by mid-March

Rising demand on its Asia-Europe express network is seeing UPS make some big investments in infrastructure and aircraft capacity to keep up.

The Port of Montreal is working to reduce dwell times for imports going by rail after rising cargo volumes increased the time sitting in terminals in late 2018 and early 2019.

Kansas City Southern has resumed service after protesters lifted a blockade that had shut down lines to and from Mexico's two largest ports.

Concor has entered into a strategic cooperation deal with Russia’s JSC RZD Logistics.