BNSF Railroad plans to begin scheduled Houston Port to Dallas and Denver multimodal service in June.
more than a year ago, BNSF began testing demand for rail service from this fast-growing Gulf Coast port. And on Monday, it said it will offer services from the Barbours Cut container terminal in Houston to its Alliance facility in Dallas and Denver intermodal facility beginning June 2.
The Port of Houston jumped from 7th to 5th place in the ranking of the top U.S. container ports in terms of TEUs processed in 2022. All trade routes to the Port of Houston continued to grow. The Trans-Pacific is the largest trade route for loaded imports, up 25.7 percent in 2022, but no ocean carrier is known to offer inland multimodal services from Houston.
Houston has not had regular multimodal service since March 2019, when Union Pacific decided to end its weekly Dallas service due to low demand. However, according to the Port of Houston Authority, Houston's throughput has increased during this period from 2.5 million TEUs in 2019 to 3 million TEUs in 2022.
Last year when Houston was experiencing an import surge with limited truck capacity, BNSF ran several trains from Barbours Cut to Alliance in April 2022, carrying a total of about 4000 containers.
BNSF said it has worked with Mediterranean Shipping, Maersk, Hapg-Lloyd and Ocean Network Express to discuss the service offering.
Based on ship arrivals, these new multimodal service schedule updates have the potential to increase frequency to meet the growing multimodal demand at the Port of Houston. The schedule of services to the league will be interrupted twice a week on Tuesday and Friday nights, with containers scheduled to be available on the following Thursday and Sunday morning respectively. The train to Denver runs once a week.
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