Cargo Business Newswire

Thursday, March 13, 2014

BNSF leads effort to add cars to resolve rail congestion

BNSF Railway is leading an effort by U.S. railroads to ease a cargo bottleneck caused by bad weather and surging crude shipments, adding hundreds of locomotives to the supply chain.

BNSF increased engines by 250 over the past two months and will add another 125 within next two months, the company said.

Union Pacific has dispatched up to 250 stored locomotives in 2014 and Norfolk Southern has deployed more than 100 from storage to help increase train speeds that have gone down by about 9 percent in recent months.

"For now, we and other railroads are essentially flooding the network with power and that's one of the things that you do to get back up on your feet," said James Squires, president of Norfolk Southern, which operates in the eastern U.S.

Petroleum and related train cargo spiked 31 percent last year to an average of 13,623 cars-per-week, as railroads are utilized to transport crude due to a shale gas-drilling boom in North America, according to the Association of American Railroads. The crude cargo continues to increase in 2014 during severe winter weather that has backlogged trains.

The rail jam has been worsened by a record grain crop, which caused Canada's transport minister to order the country's two biggest rail companies to ship a minimum of 500,000 metric tons of grain each week in order to clear an epic crop backlog. U.S. railroads hauled 13 percent more grain carloads in the first nine weeks of the year.

Squires said it could take a couple months for railroads to fix the traffic jam and return to normal speeds since the backup in the Midwest, especially around Chicago, is causing an imbalance in the system that impacts eastern rail cargo.

For more of the Business Week story: businessweek.com