By John Brooks, Executive Vice-President and Chief Marketing officer, Canadian Pacific Kansas City
Illinois lies at the center of North America’s transportation networks. It’s a reason businesses with customers and suppliers across the continent, and even the world, often choose to locate here. This you probably know. What you might not know is that my company, CPKC, recently completed a historic combination that creates single-line rail services from Illinois to interior Mexico for the first time. I want to tell you about our expanded network and the opportunities it offers for Illinois companies to simplify and improve their supply chains.
Canadian Pacific has long offered direct container services from our hubs near O’Hare Airport, at Schiller Park and Bensenville, to the ports of Montreal and Vancouver. These services tie Chicagoland to Atlantic and Pacific shipping lanes respectively and offer alternatives to the biggest U.S. ports. We work every day to run these trains safely and reliably for our customers. But what customers tell us is that they want to grow in North America to be close to suppliers and customers and to take uncertainty out of their supply chains. So while port links will continue to hold importance, we need to improve our connections within the North American continent to raise our relevance in the marketplace and better serve customers and the larger economy.
On April 14, we completed the combination of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern. Less than a month later, we launched our daily Mexico Midwest Express service between Chicago and Mexico City, with intermediate services available to Laredo, Texas; and Monterey and San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Anchoring this new service are contracts with Schneider National and Knight-Swift, two of America’s largest trucking companies.
These transit times are competitive with single-driver trucks. They also bring the advantages of rail shipping, which include greenhouse gas emissions reductions of up to 75 percent and a significant safety improvement compared to highway shipments.
But I would be remiss to focus entirely on the intermodal benefits of the CP-KCS combination. CPKC serves 90 percent of automotive assembly plants in Mexico and provides a single-line haul to our new auto transload at Bensenville. Next door is our lumber transload, where Illinois builders and distributors can pick up lumber from CPKC origins in western Canada, the southern U.S. and elsewhere. The benefits of this transaction stretch across every commodity group that we serve.
I am confident this combination will enable us to grow our business and help our customers grow theirs. CPKC is investing $275 million over three years to add the capacity we’ll need to safely and efficiently move the freight we intend to onboard as a result of the combination. Some key network upgrades we’ll bring online in the next three years include:
- An expanded and realigned Bensenville Yard that will be able to accommodate longer blocks of railcars for more efficient train assembly
- A second international bridge over the Rio Grande River in Laredo to expedite cross-border shipments
- Added siding tracks on the corridor between Chicago and Shreveport, La., providing more locations for trains to pass one another
- Upgraded track signaling and train control systems to reduce delays and keep trains in motion
We estimate freight shippers will divert 64,000 trucks annually from highway to rail as a result of our combination. At a time when businesses are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprints, we believe our expanded network reach is the right solution for many Illinois businesses.
To find out how CPKC’s network can improve your company’s supply chains, visit https://www.cpkcr.com/en-us/our-advantage.
###