FORT WORTH, Texas — The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company (BNSF) on October 7 began offering the industry’s first full-money-back guarantee for carload rail service, the railroad said in a press release.
Shippers will have the option to purchase, for a premium, a guarantee for on-time carload rail service in select lanes. With the guarantee, BNSF will offer a 100-percent refund for each load that arrives after the agreed-upon transit time at the customer’s location. BNSF measures on-time performance from the time a customer releases the car to the time it is spotted at the customer’s dock.
BNSF plans to offer guaranteed carload rail service linking key production and consumption markets including the Pacific Northwest, Northern/Southern California, the Midwest, and Texas. Initially, the on-time guarantee will be available for all commodities moving in carload equipment from the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest and Texas. In December 2002, BNSF plans to expand the guarantee to include service from the Pacific Northwest to Northern California, Southern California and Arizona. BNSF is also working to develop on-time guaranteed carload rail services that include short-line and interline partners throughout North America.
“Our efforts to redesign the carload network have resulted in our improved ability to provide customers with a more consistent and reliable service product,” says Dave Garin, group vice president, BNSF Industrial Products Marketing. “BNSF’s on-time intermodal guarantee has given new customers the confidence to try rail intermodal shipping. Given this success, and the fact that we’ve continued to meet goals for system-wide on-time performance, we simply felt it was time to offer customers a risk-free transportation alternative for carload rail service.”
BNSF was the first freight railroad to launch a full-money-back guarantee for intermodal rail service in May 2000, which has continued to run 98-percent on time. BNSF also offers the industry’s only guaranteed equipment program, which allows customers to secure the supply and placement of different railcar types, including the Centerbeam Flatcar, Boxcar, Refrigerated Boxcar, Gondola, and Bulkhead Flatcar.
A subsidiary of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (NYSE: BNI), BNSF operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with 33,000 route miles covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces. BNSF is an industry leader in Web-enabling a variety of customer transactions at www.bnsf.com . The railway moves more intermodal traffic than any other rail system in the world, is America’s largest grain-hauling railroad, transports the mineral components of many of the products we depend on daily, and hauls enough coal to generate more than 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States.