NS Offering Bonus to Drayage Truckers

Truckers are being offered a financial incentive by Norfolk Southern in an effort to get intermodal traffic moving faster from facilities in Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri.

Trains magazine reported on its website that the program offers a $200 bonus every time that a drayage driver delivers a shipping container and departs with another container.

The Dual Mission Reward Program has been implemented in Chicago at the Landers Intermodal Facility, which is the railroad’s largest terminal handling international freight.

NS officials said the program is a test effort that grew out of conversations with shippers and truckers about ways to relieve supply chain congestion.

The Trains story noted that before implementing the bonus incentives program, truckers left Landers empty about 85 percent of the time. The goal of the program is to get more trucks to leave with loads, which will improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions and fuel use by reducing the number of truck trips required.

NS to Reopen Louisville Intermodal Terminal

Norfolk Southern has done an about face and plans to reopen a Louisville, Kentucky, intermodal terminal that it closed in early summer.

In a service advisory, NS said the Louisville terminal will handle international containers from Virginia ports.

The advisory also attributed the reopening to strong growth in the Louisville intermodal market.

The terminal closed after NS shifted traffic to its Appliance Park intermodal facility in Louisville.

The reopening will occur on Oct. 4 with the terminal handling inbound traffic from Norfolk International Terminals and the Virginia International Gateway in Portsmouth.

NS said the Port of Virginia has been handling record container volume for the past year.

Storm Disrupts Some NS Service

Norfolk Southern said this week that some freight service has been disrupted by the effects of Hurricane Ida.

It issued a service advisory saying several of its facilities are inaccessible due to flooding.

Intermodal terminals in Croxton, New Jersey; Elizabeth, New Jersey; and Morrisville, Pennsylvania, are closed to incoming traffic.

Although some traffic continues to leave those facilities, NS said traffic may experience areas of standing water.

In the meantime, NS has resumed interchanging traffic in New Orleans as well as local service in Mobile, Alabama. However, the NS New Orleans Intermodal Terminal will be closed for the rest of the week.

NS to Reopen Pa. Intermodal Terminal

Norfolk Southern said this week that in an effort to ease intermodal congestion it is reopening an intermodal terminal in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, next month.

The Class 1 carrier said in a news release that the move is expected to boost intermodal capacity and “help ease supply-chain congestion that has slowed the flow of commerce across all modes of the U.S. transportation sector.”

The facility, located in Franklin County, will begin reopening in phases starting Sept. 10.

Initially it will handle domestic intermodal traffic that currently moves between NS intermodal terminals in Memphis, Tennessee, and Rutherford, Pennsylvania.

The Greencastle facility opened in January 2013 as part of NS’s Crescent Corridor initiative, but closed in 2019. At the time of its closing NS cited “business reasons” but left open the possibility of reopening the facility if market conditions changed.

The terminal has the capacity for an estimated 100,000 container lifts annually. NS said the first phase of traffic is slated to generate about 50,000 lifts.

NS Expands Capacity of Chicago Terminal

In the wake of record intermodal volume, Norfolk Southern has expanded capacity at its Landers international intermodal terminal in Chicago.

In a customer service advisory issued this week, NS said it has increased stacked container capacity by 60 percent by reconfiguring terminal operations.

NS said it added three reach-stackers, and has three more on the way, to increase lift capacity by 40 percent per hour, which will reduce dray driver dwell for container pickups.

The terminal has been reconfigured so that it is now subdivided into 10 stacks to reduce handling and dwell times.

Landers handles containers for 11 inbound and outbound trains.

NS Combining Louisville Terminals

Norfolk Southern said last week it is revamping operations of its intermodal terminals in Louisville, Kentucky.

The changes include consolidation of two terminals into a single facility at Appliance Park located southeast of downtown.

Effective July 5, all intermodal traffic traffic arriving in Louisville on NS will go to Appliance Park and the Louisville Buechel terminal will be closed to inbound shipments.

On Aug. 2, traffic destined for Norfolk, Virginia, will all depart from Appliance Park. Traffic bound for Portsmouth, Virginia, will begin all departing from Appliance Park as of Aug. 16.

In another change, NS said the Appliance Park facility is now open on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Previously, neither Louisville facility had been open on Saturdays.

NS Temporarily Suspends Accepting Some Intermodal Shipments

Norfolk Southern stopped accepting inbound international intermodal shipments on Thursday at its Landers intermodal terminal in Chicago.

Inbound loads were also temporarily no longer being accepted in Detroit and six East Coast terminals.

The railroad cited the effect of severe winter weather in the Midwest.

It was the second time this week that inbound loads at NS were temporarily suspended.

On Wednesday NS stopped accepting domestic shipments to Chicago-area terminals from several locations.

NS Chief Marketing Officer Alan Shaw said the affected terminals continue to operate but street operations had halted due to buildups of snow and ice.

NS also stopped accepting intermodal shipments interchanging to Kansas City Southern through Meridian, Mississippi, and to Union Pacific at Memphis.

CSX indicated that its Chicago intermodal terminals were struggling with the effects of winter weather but remained open.

In the meantime, Union Pacific said it will reopen all intermodal terminals by Friday after closing them earlier this week.

Congestion Prompts NS to Limit Inbound Intermodal Loads at Some Terminals

Norfolk Southern is limiting inbound loads at some of its busiest intermodal terminals due to congestion.

The affected terminals include loads moving between Chicago 63rd Street and Pittsburgh; and Toledo and Buffalo, New York.

In a service advisory NS said the Chicago 63rd Intermodal facility would remain open during the ingate closures and it urged customers to remove equipment from the facility in order to increase parking capacity.

The move came as NS and other Class 1 railroads have experienced sharply increased intermodal volumes in recent months.

NS has seen its overall intermodal traffic rise by 4.2 percent in the fourth quarter to date.

BNSF has also announced limits on inbound loads at some of its terminals.

NS Has Started Redesigning its Intermodal Network

Norfolk Southern has begun to design a revamp of its intermodal network part of the process of implementing its TOP21 operating plan.

Jeffrey Heller, NS vice president of intermodal and automotive, told an intermodal conference this week that the goal of the revamp is to find efficiencies, cut costs, and improve operations and service.

NS began implementing TOP21 in its merchandise network this past July and will follow the same process in intermodal that it did with merchandise traffic.

The carrier will improve terminal operations before making sweeping changes to road trains. NS has 50 intermodal terminals.

Heller told the annual expo of the Intermodal Association of North America that NS will seek to combine shorter intermodal trains into longer ones.

It might move anchor blocks of intermodal traffic into the consists of merchandise trains.

Those merchandise trains are fewer in number, longer, heavier and rely on distributed motive power.

Any changes to the intermodal network will likely be made early next year after NS has had the opportunity to collaborate with its shippers, Heller said.

Heller said that in the long term, railroads need to become more efficient as truckers move toward platooning and autonomous operations.

Although NS service is not where the carrier wants it to be, Heller said it has improved.

He said that TOP21, which is the moniker NS has given to its version of precision scheduled railroading, has enabled NS to become a faster, more fluid railroad with less terminal dwell times and faster average train speeds.

NS has seen a decline in its domestic intermodal business due in part to falling truck rates,.

Heller said trucking companies ordered a record number of new rigs last year and are now scrambling to find business to keep those rigs rolling.

“We are now at a decision point, where we could either chase the business or wait for the growth to come back,” Heller said.

NS, UP Changing Some Interline Intermodal Service

Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific on July 1 will change some interline intermodal service lanes.

The carriers said the changes come on the heels of other changes made earlier this year that dropped nearly 500 low-volume lanes.

The latest service changes will drop westbound interline intermodal service in 78 lanes and make terminal changes for a dozen other origin-destination pairs.

Among the changes are dropping domestic service between the Industry Terminal near Los Angeles and Toledo, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and Taylor, Pennsylvania.

NS and UP plan to consolidate domestic service at higher-volume destinations. The overall goal is to favor high-density routes that support steel wheel interchange in Chicago and Memphis, Tennessee.

The changes are limited to domestic origins on UP and international origins on NS.

NS also said it plans to discontinue international intermodal service between Detroit and Baltimore.

In a service advisory sent to shippers, UP said the changes seek to reduce transit times and improve customer experience.