BNSF added a Sunday morning eastbound departure from its Hobart terminal in Los Angeles and a Monday morning westbound departure from North Baltimore, Ohio.
BNSF began directly serving CSX’s former intermodal sorting hub in October 2018 after reaching a haulage agreement with CSX to handle the trains east of Chicago. The container-only service initially ran five days per week.
The North Baltimore terminal was the center of CSX’s hub-and-spoke intermodal system, which transferred containers between trains as a way to build density to and from smaller markets.
CSX scuttled the hub-and-spoke system in 2017 under CEO E. Hunter Harrison and has since sought to develop local traffic at the terminal on its former Baltimore & Ohio main line. BNSF sees the terminal as a way for its intermodal customers to reach Detroit; Columbus and Toledo, Ohio; Pittsburgh; and Louisville, Ky.
BNSF is likely to add more West Coast origins and destinations to the Northwest Ohio service next year, Tom Williams, group vice president of consumer products, said at the Intermodal Association of North America’s Intermodal Expo in Long Beach, Calif., earlier this month.
Retail and e-commerce continue to drive growth in BNSF’s domestic intermodal volumes, Williams says.
Intermodal has a role to play in moving e-commerce inventory between distribution centers. “We’re feeling like e-commerce will feed growth over time,” he says.
BNSF’s reservation system is giving it better visibility into incoming intermodal loads, which now include a “need by” date that allows BNSF to smooth peaks and valleys in daily volumes. About half of intermodal volume is using the system, Williams says.
BNSF is currently testing its first fully autonomous crane at its Logistics Park Kansas City.
While autonomous cranes have been in use at dockside container terminals at ports where container ships are unloaded and loaded, it’s the first time a domestic intermodal terminal has used an autonomous straddle crane to handle boxes.
