FORT WORTH, Texas — BNSF Railway has launched express carload service linking the Pacific Northwest with Denver and Salt Lake City.
The three-day a week service — with departures from Spokane, Wash., on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays — cuts transit time in half compared to traditional carload. The transit time from Spokane to Denver is three days, the railway said yesterday.
“This new express service option from Spokane to Denver and Salt Lake City builds upon our wide array of reliable service offerings and broad network reach already available to our customers,” Colby Tanner, BNSF’s group vice president of Industrial Products, said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to help our customers grow their business by providing more options in accessing some of the country’s biggest and fastest growing inland markets.”
BNSF expects the service to attract shipments of food and beverages, as well as lumber and other building materials bound for the fast-growing Denver and Salt Lake City areas.
The service runs via Sandpoint, Idaho, over the former Montana Rail Link, and through the Powder River Basin coal fields en route to Denver.
BNSF says the new carload service compliments the intermodal service it introduced between the PNW and Alliance, Texas, in 2017. That train, Q-SPOALT6, typically also carries manifest traffic.
