Union Pacific Reports More Freight Delays

Union Pacific Corp. is experiencing new railroad delays in Southern California, heightening fears among shippers that the railroad is still suffering the effects of the worst freight logjam in recent history.

In a letter to customers, the nation’s largest railroad acknowledged it was experiencing problems at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports--the nation’s two busiest ports--and on a major line from California to El Paso, Texas.

The difficulties come days after federal regulators decided to release the carrier from provisions of an emergency service order in the Gulf Coast region that allowed some competitors to serve Union Pacific customers. The end of the emergency provisions also eased public reporting requirements instituted to track the freight backups. Shippers said slowdowns last year cost them more than $100 million a month.

“I don’t know if they’re going into meltdown again, like they did last summer, but things are getting worse,” said Edward Emmett, president of the National Industrial Transportation League, the largest U.S. association of shippers.

Widespread jams on Union Pacific last summer and fall--which began in Texas and spread around the railroad’s 36,000-mile system--led the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to intervene in October.

The problems began early last year when Union Pacific moved to absorb its former competitor, Southern Pacific Rail Corp., which it acquired for $5.4 billion in 1996.

This week, the NIT League released the contents of the letter it received from the railroad acknowledging the new delays. The NIT reported to its members that “some shippers are even being told by UP officials to use other carriers, if possible,” to avoid delays.

A Union Pacific spokesman confirmed the letter’s existence, saying it reflected earlier public statements about the delays.

Emmett, in an interview, said, “If things don’t get better in the West, we will be back at the board looking” for new federal intervention.

Freight coming off ships to be transferred to Union Pacific trains are being delayed up to three days, according to Barbara Yamamoto, a spokeswoman for the Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s second-busiest.

Shippers are nervous “because they haven’t forgotten what happened last year,” Yamamoto said, when delays lasted as long as two weeks.

The league said that Jim Shattuck, Union Pacific’s executive vice president for marketing and sales, wrote that the railroad was “working aggressively to clear this backlog [in Southern California] by rerouting selected traffic and focusing on increasing resource availability for the area.”

He was responding to queries from the league, which were prompted by reports from shippers experiencing problems with their service.

Shattuck wrote that rising freight volumes, two derailments, track maintenance work and recent computer system changes combined to create the delays.

He told the league that the railroad was rerouting much of its traffic from the Sunset Route between California and Texas to other lines in order to ease congestion.