New Intermodal Terminal - I like this

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

Despite the good, steady growth of intermodal business I’m convinced the railroads could do better. (Hey, it’s just my opinion.)

They don’t have enough intermodal terminals. They bypass potentiallly lucrative traffic because of this. In the past a lot of intermodal facilities were shut down, and they were shut down for good reasons. But times have changed. Trucking costs have gone up while rail productivity has improved. I’m convinced it’s now more efficient to keep the freight on the rail to more destinations than it was 20 years ago.

So it was with pleasant surprise that I discovered that the BNSF now serves a “private” intermodal terminal in Minot, ND. In the past they were focused on reducing their number of terminals and grabing large volumes between a few terminals. But now they’ve got Minot (and Quincy, WA and Amarillo, TX and Lubbock, TX, etc.) It seems the railroads were, and are, particularly short on intermodal terminals located to serve the large agricultural market of the US. Minot is a step in the right direction.

And they hired an educated local native North Dakotan to develop the business at Minot. Here’s the linked article:

http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/17830/

Ms. Goldade has education in economics and wrote a thesis about container logistics. That’s good. The article is over a year old and I don’t know how well she has done. I hope she is doing fine and developing the Minot container market for the BNSF to everyone’s satisfaction.

In any event, the BNSF intermodal map shows the relatively new Minot intermodal terminal is … well, it’s still on the map.

I like that.

2

+1

Hopefully we’ll see more of these terminals popping up - and not just on BNSF either.

3

Here’s a link to the terminal company’s website:

http://ndportservices.com/index.php

And for those that have only a vague idea where Minot is …

NDPS will serve all areas 250 miles or more around Minot, including eastern Montana, northern South Dakota, northwestern Minnesota, southern Manitoba, and southeastern Saskatchewan.

4

Thanks for sharing those links ! Kudos to everyone involved ! I’m glad Ms. Goldade followed her instincts and researched this and wrote that paper, even though shippers told her that the subject had been “exhausted”.

John Kneiling would be pleased (though somewhat dismayed that it’s taken over 40 years and a couple generations of intermodal evolution to get even this far . . . ). But, hey - at least someone is out there thinking about all this, and making a serious effort to improve it. [Y]

  • Paul North.