things, have aggressively pushed into domestic intermodal services; this has resulted in
the conversion of millions of trailers from the
highways to the tracks. In the past year or so,
rails have shortened their intermodal lengths
of haul, encroaching even further into what
has been truckers’ sovereign territory.
Now, rails are eyeing a bigger slice of transport’s cold chain, a business they’ve been
involved in for years, albeit in a modest way.
By using intermodal for most of the total
move, operators are looking to underprice
end-to-end truck transport by 10 to 15 percent on produce shipments moving from
farm to market. How well the rails and their
partners execute could, over time, reshape
a market still controlled by truck; by some
estimates, only 2 percent of U.S. long-haul
produce traffic moves via intermodal.
Sometime in May, a service will launch
that its backers said will put a new spin on
the reefer transport tale. Dubbed “TransCold
Express,” the service calls for BNSF Railway to
operate dedicated weekly trains linking specially designed “food parks” in Wilmington,
Ill., about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, with
Selma, Calif., a town 20 miles south of Fresno
that’s known as the world’s “raisin capital.”
Heading west, a BNSF train will pull refrigerated and frozen food products such as meats
and cheeses in 50 72-foot specialized boxcars,
each one capable of holding the equivalent of
four trailerloads of palletized cargo. Coming
east, another BNSF train of identical size will
carry produce shipments from California’s
Central Valley to the Midwest. Each train will
initially operate on Wednesday and take four
days to traverse the 2,220 miles between hubs.
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
A key distinction between this and traditional
intermodal services is that it will operate as
a rail-truck hybrid instead of incorporating
a wider-reaching dray, according to Randy
McKay, CEO of McKay TransCold, an Edina,
Minn.-based company largely responsible for
developing the project. In a typical intermod-
al move, truck draymen move goods to and
from the rail ramps. However, dray equip-
ment covers only about 200 miles before driv-
ers must return to origin, McKay said. With
the new service, drivers can drop off loads at
destination, pick up another load, and head
off without returning to base, he said. McKay
said the service will increase supply chain
coverage and flexibility beyond what is avail-
able through today’s intermodal offerings.
“By loading four truckloads of cargo onto
one boxcar and then cross-docking those
goods to standard reefer trailers, we can run
those trucks as if they are regular refrigerat-
ed trucks,” McKay said in an e-mail to DC
VELOCITY. “They don’t need to deadhead
back to our yard.”
From the Selma railhead, for example,
trucks will carry goods as far south as San
Diego and as far north as the Bay Area,
McKay said. There are no plans to extend ser-
vice into the Pacific Northwest, McKay said.
Eastbound, goods can be trucked up to 500
miles to points in the Midwest and into the
East and South, he said.
About half of the fleet will consist of ded-
icated contract carriage, with the remainder
coming from the spot market, McKay said.
He declined to identify the name of the fleet
contractor. Private fleets operated by ben-
eficial cargo owners may also be involved,
meaning a retailer’s trucks can meet the
freight at the intermodal hub instead of hav-
ing McKay’s trucks deliver the loads to the
retailer’s door.
The Wilmington distribution hub, known
as RidgePort, is being developed by Ridge
Property Trust, a Chicago-based private
real estate investment trust (REIT). Van-G
