Journal of Commerce (December , 2006) and Traffic World (February 2007) recently reported that North Star Rail Intermodal LLC (NSRI) will use RailRunner’s Terminal Anywhere™ technology to provide shipping services for the agribusiness and Identity Preserved grain market in Southwestern Minnesota. US Department of Agriculture AMS website indicates that shipment of grain in containers was 4% of grain shipments in 2006, up from 2% in 2005. This growth includes both Identity Preserved grain products and bulk products preferentially shipped through containers. The NSRI service, set to begin in this summer, allows farmers, processors and ethanol producers to ship their products to overseas markets by container, reducing the transportation costs, while preserving the increased value of specialized agriculture products.
If Western Minnesota farmers, processors and ethanol producers want to take advantage of container shipping today, they must truck their products to a Minneapolis/St. Paul intermodal “hub,” where it is transloaded into containers to gain access to international markets. NSRI extends the benefits of container-based shipping to communities throughout western Minnesota and eastern North and South Dakota, providing a significant reduction in shipping costs that NSRI estimates offers efficient access to higher value markets.
This is an important development for the agricultural markets in Minnesota and an important milestone for RailRunner. This shows that our market approach is the right one for bringing RailRunner bi-modal technology to the intermodal market: RailRunner offers shipping with trucking flexibility at railroad economies – a combination no other technology makes possible – and NSRI is just the sort of company we have in mind to serve as a RailRunner Service Operator – a company with strong local roots, presence, and expertise that is focused on the opportunity that our technology provides in a specific market.
NSRI has built an intermodal terminal in Montevideo, MN, approximately 130 miles west of Minneapolis. The terminal allows shippers to load their product into standard international containers from either hopper trucks or railcars, or to load agriproducts directly into containers at the farm, processing center or ethanol plant and trucked the short distance to the Montevideo terminal, where, using Terminal Anywhere technology, the highway chassis carrying the container can be converted in a matter of minutes to an intermodal railcar. North Star, working with local manufacturer J&D Construction, has designed a specialized grain loader for containers that collects delivered grain from either hopper trucks or hopper cars and dispenses scaled and certifiable payloads to individual containers on chassis. The loader offers automated sampling probes, volume and weight control and a fast cleaning process to quickly switch among different products while maintaining product specifications.
NSRI will offer, on the Twin Cities & Western Railroad (TCWR), regularly-scheduled, reliable container-based transport service to farmers, growers and processors at per-ton prices competitive with bulk grain shipping to international ports in Asia, Europe and Latin America. The system will link to the Canadian Pacific Railway in Minneapolis and, thereby, to international markets through Vancouver, B.C., and Montreal, Quebec. NSRI has partnered with Hapag-Lloyd Container Lines, COSCO, OOLC and other ocean carriers to manage the delivery of the containers to their ultimate destinations.
North Star is an example of RailRunner’s focus on value-added short haul intermodal in vertical markets. Contact us directly if you have an intermodal demand that isn’t being met because of your distance from a major intermodal center.