The Changing Transportation Market

The world is moving toward container shipping. As the pace of global trade and the need for more specialized products continue to accelerate, it is the container that provides the logistic foundation. The standardized container is one of the most important innovations in industrial technology of the last 50 years – on par with the bar code.

Yet the benefits of containerized transportation have not reached deep into the North American agricultural base. Moving the containers from mode to mode – truck to rail to ship and back – traditionally has required huge amounts of trackside real estate and substantial capital investment in terminals built around massive cranes or a shift to non-standard, non-container intermodal vehicles. Thus, large transportation hubs such as Minneapolis have emerged as transfer points to provide the access to containerized intermodal transport.

North Star is the first company to bring the advantages of standard container-based rail transport to a much wider agricultural market in a cost-effective system, thus dramatically extending the reach of intermodal rail shipping. North Star's service makes intermodal transportation cost-effective both for shorter runs – less than 1,000 miles – and to smaller terminals. With as little as a small rail siding, a user can load or unload a train onto trucks without the need for expensive gantry cranes and their attendant staff. All that's required is some gravel or concrete grading on and by the tracks, and about 75 feet of maneuvering room for each rail car.

With the technology that North Star will provide, a farmer, a processor or an ethanol producer can now can to tap into the containerized intermodal system with relative ease. Specialized agriproducts or DDGS can be loaded into containers right at the elevator, the farm, or the ethanol plant. The container is mounted on a chassis that can be pulled by truck or locomotive and the products stay in the same container, whether on highway, rail or ship, all the way to the customer’s loading dock.

The fact that the United States is a huge importer of products from international markets, particularly Asia, actually works in favor of containerization. The imbalance of containerized imports to exports has left a substantial excess of empty containers in North America. Since transoceanic shippers need to move their containers back to the international markets to carry the next load of freight to the United States, they often offer favorable shipping rates for full containers – since their alternative is to ship them back empty. Combined with the basic efficiencies of containerization, this mode of shipping can save as much as $20 to $30 per ton in transportation costs.