Railroads Seek to Break Truckers' Stranglehold on Mexican Freight

MONTERREY, Mexico — Top North American railroads are determined to break trucking’s stranglehold on Mexico’s international and domestic freight. Rail executives figure the ripest field of opportunity lies in intermodal.

Trucks carry 88% of the cargo shipped within Mexico and almost that much between Mexico and the United States.

“Look at the trucks backed up six to seven miles in Laredo, [Texas],” said Dan Beers, vice president of intermodal for Transportacion Ferroviaria Mexicana, the northeastern Mexican railway concession owned by Kansas City Southern Railway and a Mexican partner. Beers was one of a dozen rail executives addressing intermodalism in Mexico at a Feb. 24 session of Transporte Internacional 99.

More than 7,000 truckloads of goods transit Laredo-Nuevo Laredo daily, according to the U.S. Customs Service — that’s 2,000 trailers more than the daily rate in 1997, a growth that comes while the Mexican economy is still recovering from the peso disaster that hit at the end of 1994.

“We want just 5% of that traffic,” Beers said. He thinks that’s a reasonable goal — except that, as he recognized, “trucks are so dominant, intermodalism in Mexico is not on anyone’s lips.”

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