LOS ANGELES — In an effort to help kick start the Port of Los Angeles’ and Long Beach’s recently announced Accelerate Cargo initiative to expedite freight flows from the Long Beach/Los Angeles port complexes, BNSF Railway will offer a new weekend in-gate incentive at its Los Angeles Hobart and Commerce Intermodal Facilities. Ocean carrier customers will receive a $50 incentive per ocean container that in-gates on a Saturday or Sunday at either facility for the next three weekends. The new BNSF program is meant to boost collaborative 24/7 supply chain operations and reduce the current backlog of cargo in the port complexes.
The news comes from a BNSF customer service update dated Sept. 23.
In addition, BNSF has taken measures to increase capacity, improve rail performance, and position its network to handle more volume as we head into the peak holiday shipping season. Those include:
- Process improvements and collaboration with carrier partners to improve throughput at our inland hubs and reduce the backlog of trains holding in Chicago and Memphis
- Reopened BNSF’s Harvard Intermodal Facility in the Memphis market for certain international intermodal freight, providing additional capacity and service to a key market
- Streamlined train loading and unloading processes through collaboration with our carrier partners to facilitate loading directly from the chassis to the train and vice versa thus bypassing additional handling within the intermodal facilities, improving efficiency and throughput
- Offered enhanced communication to provide dray carriers with real-time data on shipments so that they can more efficiently plan and prioritize cargo delivery and improve driver turn times and productivity
What good is it to put incentive’s at Hobart or Commerce when you can’t get your stuff drayed in and out of Willow Springs or Joliet? Restoring capability at Memphis Harvard is a great idea to bypass the craziness in Chicago but you had that option last year. What took so long?
I watched BNSF move some monster long doublestack trains in August across AZ and NM. On another trip along I-40 many were idling.