(The following story by Dan Piller appeared on the Star-Telegram Staff website on August 27.)
HASLET, Texas — Truckers delivering loads into the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway intermodal terminal Wednesday could feel the love as railroad executives greeted them with smiles, handshakes, free soft drinks and signs proclaiming the railroad’s affection for the over-the-road crowd.
The staging of “We Love Truckers” day would shock earlier generations of the transportation industry, mindful of the bitterness between the two modes of transportation that developed as the trucking industry has seized a big chunk of the intercity freight business from railroads since World War II.
But the combination of high fuel prices, customers’ just-in-time delivery demands, a burst of Chinese imports, and intermodal – combined rail and truck – freight delivery have brought the warring parties into the same camp.
For years railroads complained and lobbied angrily against publicly funded highways, which they viewed as a subsidy for their competitors. Truckers fought with railroads in state capitals and in Washington over taxes and weight limits. The arguments frequently spilled over to truck stops and union halls.
“I’ve been in trucking for 30 years, and I can remember how there has been so much backbiting between railroads and truckers,” said Steve Seeger of Kennedale as he climbed out of his Schneider Transport cab and checked into the intermodal dock.
“There has been an adversarial relationship between railroads and trucks,” said John Hickerson, BNSF’s vice president for truckload sales, as he stood on the dock and greeted truckers rolling into the loading facility.
But that was then. Today, the rivalry between rails and trucks has given way to cooperation. Railroaders and truckers now say that burying the hatchet and working together is good for business.
More and more long-haul freight, particularly retail products that end up in places like Wal-Mart and Target, makes its trip in two stages. First, there is a long segment on rail to terminals like BNSF’s intermodal center in Haslet, a part of the Alliance Airport industrial park. The containers, two to a rail flatcar, are then lifted by forklifts and placed on flatbed truck trailers for the short haul to warehouses and stores.
The combined trip saves money by using less fuel than a long truck trip but still gives the shipper the door-to-door service that most retailers and industry have become accustomed to.
“Our container business is up 18 percent this year,” Hickerson said. “It’s the fastest-growing volume segment we have.”
Hickerson is one of the new breed of railroad executives with trucking experience; he worked for Conway Express. His bosses at BNSF, marketing Vice President John Lanigan and BNSF Chief Executive Matt Rose, also put in some time in the trucking industry before working on the railroad.
Rail is an efficient way to move cargo long distances: A 100-car train, with double-stacked containers, can move the cargo equivalent of more than 200 trucks, with a two-person crew.
Semitrailer trucks, meanwhile, get six to seven miles per $1.85 gallon of diesel fuel. So truckers depend on rail to get cargo to transit points where they can pick it up for local delivery.
Another factor in cross-country shipments has been a surge in imports through Southern California ports bound for the heartland. Big new Chinese ships can typically handle 2,400 or more containers of Asian imports, enough to fill 12 100-car trains.
The BNSF terminal is dotted with shipping containers bearing Asian names such as Hyundai, China Express and Cosco. About 35 percent of the containers that move through the terminal originate in Asia.
So where truckers and railroads once fought bitterly for business, there now is enough to go around.
Joyce Jordan, chief operating officer of the Dallas center for the Dart trucking company, says that intermodal shipments have been a godsend to Dart.
“It makes us competitive on business that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to take,” said Jordan, a 26-year trucking veteran.
Trucker Seeger noted another advantage to rail-truck cooperation.
“I did cross-country hauling for years, and I can tell you that’s hard on marriage and family life,” he said. “This way, I do all my hauling locally, in and out of the terminal here, and I can be home every night.”
Indeed, truck executives are sweating a severe shortage of drivers, caused primarily by the nomadic lifestyle of what drivers call “long-haul freight.”
“I could use another 300 drivers right now, if we could only find them,” Jordan said.
Each day about 1,500 trucks come in and out of the Haslet terminal, delivering or picking up loads. The terminal will total about 500,000 “lifts” of containers or truckloads this year, according to operations manager Glen Smith.
“I have six big lifting cranes working 24/7 right now, and a seventh is due here in October,” Smith said. “I could use that seventh crane today, if it was here.”