CEO PERSPECTIVES, RAILWAY AGE APRIL 2025 ISSUE: At BNSF, our Southern Transcon is the busiest route along our vast 32,500-mile network, stretching 2,200 miles from Southern California to Chicago. In fact, 70% of BNSF’s intermodal volume touches the Southern Transcon.
With intermodal business being one of our largest opportunities for growth, having the capacity to handle that growth, particularly on the Transcon, is paramount. That’s why we’ve consistently invested in our people, technology, expansion projects, services, and maintenance along this key route.
Late last year, we completed a key segment of double-tracking on the Transcon in eastern Kansas, which makes the entirety of this route 99.98% double, triple, or quadruple-tracked. We can now run multiple priority intermodal trains in and out of Southern California daily, faster between key markets to deliver consistent and reliable service to our customers. Now, just like trucks on the highway, traffic runs in both directions simultaneously with multiple passing lanes available.
In late summer, we also completed our new main line improvement project in Becker, N.Mex., adjacent to our network’s largest fueling facility, in Belen, N.Mex. The Becker facility will minimize the time it takes for all our trains to fuel and get moving again toward their destination, improves our railroad’s total train capacity through the Southern Transcon by roughly 30%, and improves service consistency for existing customers.
As weather events have increased in both frequency and severity, we’ve made deliberate resiliency investments to harden our network along this busy corridor during extreme weather conditions, including a wind fence at Sais, N.Mex., and a satellite network to monitor intensifying weather patterns. These investments allow us to better plan in advance of weather events, ensuring quicker recovery and uninterrupted service for our customers.
BNSF’s expansion plan for this year, announced with our 2025 capital plan of $3.8 billion, builds on our investments for customer growth by continuing to invest in facility and line expansion projects that increase network capacity. Major line expansion projects on the Transcon include continuing a multi-year project to construct approximately 20 miles of third main line track near Needles, Calif., and increasing siding capacity on our main line track near Phoenix, Ariz. On the east end of our Transcon, the multi-year expansion project at our Cicero Intermodal facility in Chicago is expected to be completed in 2026, bringing greater capacity and a better customer experience.
Our new Logistics Park in Phoenix (LPP), announced last year, will be a 4,300-acre rail-served facility designed to offer streamlined supply chain solutions by responding to the dynamic needs of our customer base.
Development activities also continue at Barstow International Gateway (BIG) in California, where our state-of-the-art master planned integrated rail facility will be a step-level evolution for the supply chain, delivering a product competitive with trucks but with the capacity, value, and emissions benefits of rail.
This approach has worked so well for intermodal, that we’re now applying it to the carload side, as well. Logistics Centers are BNSF-owned business parks that provide access to rail-served origins and destinations where customers may not be able to realize the economic and efficiency benefits of rail today. We’re opening our latest Logistics Center in North Houston at Cleveland, Tex., early this summer. Construction on our next Logistics Center, in North Dallas, will also begin this summer. We continue to grow with our agricultural customers, as well, to find new markets like renewable diesel and feedstocks.
Speaking of growth, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our breakthrough intermodal service, Quantum with JB Hunt, which has been exceeding expectations since its launch a little more than a year ago. Performance has consistently been better than the 95% on-time delivery commitment, up to a day faster than traditional intermodal service. We have a dedicated 24/7 team providing oversight of every load to consistently meet the demands of Quantum customers’ most complex freight.
We believe our ongoing focus on these key opportunities to improve resiliency across our network places our customers at the center of everything we do, and helps us remain the safest, fastest, and most efficient rail provider in North America.
