J.B. Hunt, BNSF, and GMXT launch Quantum de México, focusing on U.S.–Mexico Intermodal Freight

Late last week, a trio of freight transportation service providers—J.B. Hunt Transport Services, a subsidiary of Lowell, Ark.-based trucking and intermodal services bellwether J.B. Hunt, Fort Worth, Texas-based Class I railroad carrier BNSF Railway, and Mexico-based rail services provider GMXT—rolled out a new intermodal service focusing on the Mexican market.

Entitled Quantum de México, the companies said that this service, which follows the November 2023 rollout of the U.S.-based intermodal service by BNSF and J.B. Hunt, Quantum, “provides the consistency, agility, and speed needed to transport sensitive highway freight using rail, meeting businesses’ ‘just in time’ freight needs,” adding that it is optimized for efficiency, with a 95+% on-time delivery rate, which they noted is up to one day faster than traditional intermodal service.

Key components of the new Quantum de México service include:

• the utilization of the latest advancements in tracking and monitoring systems, providing real-time visibility and control over shipments, minimizing delays sand optimizing performance;
• designated J.B. Hunt, BNSF and GMXT support teams providing 24x7 oversight, delivering consistent and reliable transit times, including features like priority drayage as well as railcar loading and unloading; and
• the service operating on key routes connecting major cities and U.S. and Mexican industrial hubs, with among the markets served being Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, the U.S. West Coast, and U.S. eastern destinations in the U.S. and Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey in Mexico

“Mode conversion is one of the leading opportunities businesses can leverage in today’s economic environment to drive efficiency and cost savings,” said Spencer Frazier, executive vice president of sales and marketing at J.B. Hunt. “The collaboration we’re announcing brings the full suite of our industry-leading intermodal service and its unmatched service excellence, scale and capacity to Mexico, building on the innovative success of a 35-year relationship.”

And BNSF Group Vice President-Consumer Products John Gabriel said that Quantum de México represents what he called a significant milestone in his company’s commitment to innovation and excellence in logistics.

“Expanding our reach from coast to coast allows us to harness our collective strengths and broaden our ability to deliver an unparalleled experience to our customers,” he said.

What’s more, last year, the J.B. Hunt, BNSF, and GMXT rolled out an intermodal service to and from Mexico through the Eagle Pass Gateway, with the companies noting that they collectively offer one of the most comprehensive North American freight transportation networks in their respective ways, including J.B. Hunt owning and operating the largest intermodal fleet in North America with national coast-to-coast market access; BNSF operating the largest intermodal rail network in North America; and GMXT being the largest rail provider in Mexico.

The companies also highlighted the potential intermodal growth opportunities in Mexico, as it is now one of the top 10 global exporters, with more than two-thirds of this exports going to the U.S. across various sectors, including automotive, manufacturing, agricultural, electronics and other service-sensitive freight areas, while noting almost 70% freight transported across the Mexico/U.S. border is moved by traditional over-the-road (OTR) highway transport.

“The collaboration looks to capitalize on the untapped potential of intermodal service for businesses moving freight in and out of Mexico, including converting OTR highway freight to rail intermodal and optimizing container efficiency,” they said. “Intermodal conversion is the most widely available ground transportation solution for cutting carbon emissions, reducing a shipment’s carbon footprint by an average of 65% compared to OTR truck transportation.”

When BNSF and J.B. Hunt Transport Services rolled out its Quantum service in November 2023, the companies said that the service accommodates what they called the service-sensitive highway freight needs of customer supply chains. And they added that the main objective of the service is on providing the consistency, agility, and speed required to move service-sensitive highway freight via rail, with a specific customer focus on service expectations, transit requirements, and operational procedures.

They also explained that the Quantum service is comprised of J.B. Hunt and BNSF operators working out of the same location, at the recently-opened Intermodal Innovation Center at the BNSF Fort Worth, Texas headquarters, where the “workflow is integrated at every step of the intermodal shipping process—from planning to execution and oversight to exception management.”

In an interview with LM at that time, Darren Field, president of intermodal, at J.B. Hunt, explained the driver for Quantum stemmed from, J.B. Hunt and BNSF, for decades, having executed pricing exercises with shipper customers and talking to them about the value proposition of intermodal versus highway, going back to 1989, when J.B. Hunt and Santa Fe Railway, BNSF’s moniker at the time, introduced a service also called Quantum, which was comprised of 150 trailers, and was at the early stages of myriad intermodal innovations, including: double-stacking containers; creating company-owned chassis; and adding onsite terminals and express gates.

“And still today through our bid process, proposal process, through all sorts of data analytics that we do with customers, there's somewhere between 7 million to 11 million loads that we think intermodal can and should be the right answer,” he said. “But those customers are hesitant to provide that business to intermodal for a host of reasons.”

Among those reasons was the perceived risk of intermodal being too great to those shipper customers, he noted. That led, he said, to the companies thinking about the steps they could take to produce a product in a design and customized answer in a way that gives those customers confidence, provides value and an appropriate alternative to highway use, for all of the benefits that intermodal provides to the shippers, as well as sustainability benefits.