SCHAUMBURG, Ill. — When people in shipping or logistics discuss the advantages of trucking over railroads, one of the things they talk about is ease of use.
Union Pacific is working on addressing that, at least when it comes to its online portal for customers, says Kenny Rocker, executive vice president, marketing and sales.
“Some of you go to our websites today,” Rocker said at last week’s Midwest Association of Rail Shippers Winter Meeting, “and there can be quite a few clicks. If you’re doing a waybill, you go in and you click. And then if you want to do a trace, you have to do another click and get out of that area and go to another area. If you want to pay your bills, you click out of that and go somewhere else. …
“We’ve sat down with a lot of our customers — not just our large customers, some of our receivers, some of our customers that don’t go to the website quite a bit, and gotten feedback on how do we get it in one place? The vision for us is getting the number of clicks down. We don’t want you clicking and clicking. We want it on one page where you can get to it.
“In preliminary development, we’ve seen some rollout. The big rollout, look for that in the second quarter. … We expect this to be transformative, as we talk to our customers, we’ve gotten feedback we think is good. We’re seeing 90 companies involved.”
Rocker also wanted to assure shippers that — with rail cargo theft increasingly in the news — the railroad is working to address security, having spent $40 million in that area since January 2023.
“We spent considerable dollars going out and hardening our infrastructure,” he said. “Along with that. — I don’t feel bad saying this — the number of arrests have gone up about 14%. So we’re arresting more people. You come on our trains and steal something. I want to push you behind bars for a while. None of that stuff where somebody bails you out. We need to make an example.”
Measures have also included the addition of state-of-the-art cameras, drones, and thermal imaging. “We did a lot of partnerships, especially in the California area, to collaborate with the local communities to have more visibility,” he said.
“I can’t give you a number of what we plan to do in the future,” he said, “but I can tell you we’re very bullish. We will be very bullish in 2025 about hardening the infrastructure even more across the network, across Chicago, across Memphis, across LA. We’re doing all of that for growth. You don’t really have ROI [return on investment] on some of these security measures, but we’re still talking about it because believe in making sure our customers can get their products in safely.”
Other topics touched by Rocker included:
— Union Pacific’s influence with Ferromex, the Mexican rail operator that has been a source of concern for U.S. shippers regarding its ability to handle cross-border movements, particularly of grain [see “U.S. grain shippers say Ferromex lacks capacity …,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 1, 2024]. UP owns 26% of Ferromex.
“I think everyone knows that we’ve got a couple of board seats there, and I’ll tell you that [CEO] Jim Vena has been very active as a board participant,” Rocker said. “… He has been down in Mexico on the head haul of a train, looking their infrastructure in the interior of Mexico, not just at the border. I spent more time personally in Mexico than at any other time in my career.
“Yes, we have frequent calls and monthly calls. Yes, we’ve done things like help them from an equipment perspective as they’ve had a little bit more demand. Yes, we share, where we can, best practices. So we’re doing everything we can. I’ll tell you their service product has improved. It’s better. I’ve seen a few customers that will support that. … We feel like we made a difference. They still have to execute what they’re doing, but we feel like we’ve been very active.”
— Rocker spoke shortly after Surface Transportation Board chairman Robert Primus, who expressed great concern about Class I railroads’ failure to grow, and discussed UP’s growth goals and efforts.
“If you exclude coal, since ’16, Union Pacific has grown about 3%,” he said. “My boss won’t allow me to exclude this, or exclude that, but I do think context matter when we’re talking about growth. …
“We talk about the economy. I don’t care what the economy’s going to do, I just want to beat the economy. So if the economy is flat, we want to be better than flat. If the economy is up 2%, we want to be better than 2%. That’s the mindset we have with the economy.
“But the other piece is how we want to grow. Yes, the largest percentage will be over the road, as you think about east to west, West Coast border, if you look at Mexico. … As an industry, if you look at in and out of Mexico, rail has about 15% of that. We’ve got a beautiful franchise, we got a strong service product that’s hitting all marks, we’ve got everyday service, so that’s an area that we want to grow.”
