(The following article by Katherine Yung was posted on the Dallas Morning News website on August 29.)
WILMER, Texas — Union Pacific Railroad plans to open a $100 million international intermodal terminal today that is expected to significantly boost Asian imports coming through the Dallas area.
The Dallas Intermodal Terminal could eventually handle 365,000 containers a year, 66 percent more than the facility it replaces.
The expansion reflects the spectacular growth in imports from China, the Dallas-Fort Worth area’s top trade partner for the past two years.
The region’s total trade with China soared to $10 billion last year, more than double the amount in 2002.
Nearly all of the trade consists of machinery, furniture and other goods made in China.
Intermodal refers to freight that moves by more than one mode of transportation using a single type of shipping container, eliminating the need to repack cargo. These days, most intermodal shipping involves containers transported by ships from China to California, then moved by rail to other parts of the country.
Because of the surge in imports, Union Pacific, the nation’s largest freight railroad, had been running out of room at its Miller international intermodal terminal, just south of downtown Dallas.
The terminal, which sits on 364 acres south of Dallas, solves this problem and uses technology to dramatically speed up the time it takes for truck drivers to pick up their loads of containers.
With the new facility, “Dallas becomes a really tremendously competitive inland point for Asian imports,” said Brian McDonald, vice president of intermodal marketing and sales at Union Pacific, which is based in Omaha, Neb.
Surging demand
The opening of the terminal couldn’t have come at a better time. Railroads such as Union Pacific are handling more intermodal business than ever because of the boom in trade with China and other Asian countries.
The nation’s railroads carried more intermodal containers during the week ended Aug. 20 than in any previous week on record, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Demand has been so strong that Union Pacific’s chief rival, Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., announced last November an expansion of its intermodal terminal at AllianceTexas, north of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
Union Pacific’s new facility boasts 10 lanes for inbound and outbound traffic compared with four at the Miller yard. And it contains 4,000 parking slots for containers, more than 2.5 times the number at Miller.
To both speed up operations and strengthen security at the new facility, optical recognition cameras are used to check shipments and finger scanners identify drivers.
All these improvements are expected to eliminate long lines of truck drivers waiting to get in and out with their cargo.
“It allows us to receive trains more efficiently,” said Eric Anderson, a Union Pacific superintendent of intermodal operations.
The Dallas Intermodal Terminal is located 12 miles from downtown Dallas along Interstate 45 in Wilmer. It’s six miles south of the Miller terminal, which ceased operations on Saturday.
Bigger plans
In addition to making transporting freight easier, the new terminal is also expected to play a key role in the city’s efforts to create an inland port south of downtown.
The terminal sits near a Federal Express distribution center, and city officials hope to lure similar kinds of development.
Nearly all of the containers headed for the Wilmer yard come from the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports in Southern California and are carried by rail through Arizona and New Mexico to El Paso and then on to Dallas.
The new terminal makes this route a more attractive option for shippers.
“We’re definitely going to look at it,” said David Walker, executive vice president of logistics and allocation for Fort Worth-based Pier 1 Imports Inc., which buys massive quantities of merchandise from the Far East.