BY MARK B. SOLOMON, SENIOR EDITOR

MOTOR FREIGHT

IN AN EPISODE OF THE TV SERIES “MAD MEN,” A chronicle of the 1960s New York advertising world through the eyes of a fictitious agency, the daughter of one of the partners pleads with him to invest in a wondrous idea called “refrigerated transportation.” Imagine a world, she tells him in early 1968, where fresh and frozen foods can be transported door to door by trucks over thousands of miles without spoiling.

If ever in this business there were a case of art imitating life, this is it. With the advent of superior refrigeration systems and more powerful and efficient diesel engines, long-haul refrigerated, or reefer, trucking took off in the early 1970s. It created new choices for consumers, new markets for shippers, and a new industry—and virtual monopoly— for carriers. It has been that way for nearly a half century.

But the last few years have shown that railroads are more than willing to jump into the truckers’ traditional sandbox. The rails, knowing truck shippers are concerned about volatile fuel costs, increased regulatory pressure, and capacity availability, among other 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.