Kansas City Southern Teams Up with Commtrex

Kansas City Southern (KCS) announced last week that the company has teamed-up with  Commtrex in order to enhance the visibility and connectivity of the KCS network of over 100 transload facilities in the US and Mexico using the Commtrex platform.

The KCS transload network transports food and agricultural commodities, bulk materials, chemicals, paper and forest products, steel and other metals, while the Commtrex platform allows shippers to search for transload centers by location, commodities handled, services provided and other parameters to develop their freight rail options. Close to one-third of Commtrex’s 2,300 members are rail-served shippers, according to the company’s press release. The team formed between KCS and Commtrex is in response to the increasingly complex and volatile global supply chains, capacity constraints, labor shortages, rising transportation costs, as well as growing trade throughout North America due to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

“Working with Commtrex to support transload volume growth in the US and Mexico supports our vision to be the fastest-growing, best-performing, most customer-focused transportation provider in North America. This will help customers identify transload locations in competitive markets and secure shipping locations in Mexico - one of the fastest emerging logistics markets today,” said KCS executive vice president and chief marketing officer Mike Naatz.

“The ability to easily connect shippers with transload facilities at origin and destination to help them develop a rail shipping plan, will facilitate greater conversion of truckload freight to rail. We thank KCS for entrusting us to support the continued growth of their transload footprint. Our team is excited to realize new efficiencies for KCS’ transload operations and shippers as we drive more commercial opportunities through our digital rail logistics platform,” said Commtrex chief executive officer Martin Lew.

Kansas City Southern was recently in the spotlight when the squabble over the merger with Kansas City Southern finally settled with Canadian Pacific (CP) over Canadian National (CN). After careful renegotiations between KCS and CP, KCS notified CN that it intends to terminate KCS’s merger agreement with CN and enter into the definitive agreement with CP, as reported by MBN.