Amtrak Freight Grows

SAN DIEGO — Amtrak said it expects its fledgling express freight business to increase by 29% during the current fiscal year, to $107 million, with most of the business being diverted from trucking carriers.

“Our business is primarily coming from trucks,” E.E. Ellis, who runs Amtrak’s Mail & Express Division, said. “We don’t believe we’re competing with the freight railroads.”

The rail carrier is considering entering the perishables business, which is a $15 billion a year market, Mr. Ellis told a news conference at the National Industrial Transportation League’s annual meeting in San Diego Nov. 16.

He said Amtrak has been conducting a test of the perishables business with eight used refrigerated boxcars it acquired. A decision is expected within a month.

Amtrak’s entry into the freight business has been controversial, since most of its operations outside of the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, which it owns, run over track owned by the nation’s freight railroads.

Railroads, led by the Union Pacific, challenged Amtrak’s right to run freight cars over its track, but the U.S. Surface Transportation Board in May ruled that Amtrak was given the right by Congress to run mail and express freight operations.

Amtrak turned to freight service in 1996 as way of raising money to cover losses on its primary mission: running virtually all of the nation’s inter-city trains. Up to then, Amtrak’s freight operations were nearly exclusively carrying mail for the U.S. Postal Service Today, Amtrak operates a fleet of 807 freight cars, including 291 RoadRailer units, truck bodies that run on steel wheels over the rails and then convert to rubber tires for final delivery.

For the full story, see the Nov. 23 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.

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