OMAHA, Neb. — Union Pacific has tightened its domestic intermodal schedules between the Los Angeles Basin and Chicago by two days, and now offers three-day transit time that is competitive with team driver truck service.
“In an effort to better serve our customers and simultaneously penetrate volume moving over the road, Union Pacific is pleased to share that we have implemented a new ‘Z’ train service pair between the Los Angeles Basin and the Chicago metroplex,” the railroad said in a May 1 customer announcement.
The new daily service links the City of Industry terminal in Southern California to Global 2 in Northlake, Ill.
“We are delivering the service we sold to our customers — and we’re now able to do it faster,” CEO Jim Vena said in a statement today. “Our railroad offers 70-mph service, allowing us to compete for business, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions up to 75% for our customers.”
Executives from Schneider National, one of UP’s truckload domestic intermodal customers, praised the faster service on the company’s earnings call yesterday.
“We’re really excited about the fact that we have an improvement in transit time on the largest corridor. So we’re going from a position where we were 24 hours behind the competing transit to now we’re 24 hours faster than the competing transit,” said James Filter, Schneider’s group president of transportation and logistics. “So we think we have an opportunity to continue to grow there. We feel really good about that.”
Filter also praised capacity expansions that UP has made at the Inland Empire terminal in Fontana, Calif., which handles imported goods that have been transloaded into domestic containers. “There is nothing constricting us from growing that really important corridor,” Filter says.
The new service from LATC includes faster steel wheel interchanges with CSX and Norfolk Southern for containers bound for destinations in the Ohio Valley and Northeast. In addition, the westbound service from Global 2 to the City of Industry and Inland Empire Intermodal Terminal now includes Z train service.
“We are excited about this new product, which is part of our continuing effort to find new ways to meet our customers’ needs, while removing trucks off our nation’s highways and providing a consistent, reliable product,” said Kenny Rocker, UP’s executive vice president of marketing and sales.
In November, Vena told an investor conference that the railroad was considering routes where it can cut transit times to be more competitive with trucks and other railroads. Since becoming CEO in August 2023, Vena has touted UP’s ability to run premium traffic at 70 mph.
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