CHICAGO — Norfolk Southern’s experimental less-than-carload expedited boxcar service has been expanded and has won praise as an example of how railroads can take freight off highways.
The Thoroughbred Freight Transfer service — launched in July linking Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami — now includes lanes connecting Croxton, N.J., with Chicago and Atlanta, Ed Elkins, the railroad’s vice president of industrial products, told the North American Rail Shippers conference this month.
NS provides door-to-door service. Trucks pick up small loads and deliver them to a rail-served warehouse where the shipments are cross-docked into waiting boxcars. The boxcars then move in intermodal trains. The process is reversed at the destination, with trucks making the last-mile delivery.
Surface Transportation Board Chairman Martin J. Oberman, who has ratcheted up his criticism of Class I railroads this year, praised the Thoroughbred Freight Transfer experiment in a letter to NS CEO Jim Squires this week.
“While I know this service is starting off on a small scale, I congratulate NS on being creative in its efforts to expand its service and increase the shifting of freight from truck to rail,” Oberman wrote. “I am hopeful that your team will be successful in implementing this new service across your network and increasing its positive impact and can set an example for others to be creative and aggressive in finding new ways to serve existing and potential rail customers.”
Oberman toured Norfolk Southern’s Landers intermodal terminal and Calumet Yard in Chicago on Sept. 2 to learn more about how the railroad is handling intermodal traffic and the steps it is taking to alleviate international intermodal congestion.
“As you know, I have been emphasizing the importance of shifting freight from truck to rail, which I believe we all agree better serves the public with cleaner air and safer highways,” Oberman wrote. “This less-than-carload service also allows NS to maximize utilization of boxcars at a time when we are facing an international shortage of containers.”
The NS boxcar service, Oberman added, “is a welcome step in the right direction” as railroads work to alleviate pressure on the supply chain.
Elkins says the Thoroughbred Freight Transfer is a hybrid between intermodal and carload.
“It takes the two best parts of each. It takes the very predictable, high-quality service of the intermodal network. It doesn’t get humped. And it’s predictable within hours,” he says.
“And it takes what I would call the extraordinary payload capacity of a boxcar, coupled with technology that allows us to sell it in increments and build really a new product.”
But he stressed that the service remains an experiment to tap a market that could be worth $2 billion. The potential market for NS includes freight that’s heavy or odd sized, a segment that less than truckload carriers try to avoid.
“There’s a lot of freight out there that could move in this kind of service,” Elkins says. “And let me be clear: I don’t know if a year from now we’ll still be doing this experiment. We may be bigger, we may be smaller, we may not be doing it.”
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