BNSF Today

UPS Peak Season Another Success

2006-01-06

It was a steep uphill climb. But in the end, Team BNSF came through in the clutch during the 2005 UPS Peak season. Peak season, of course, is the time of year when BNSF and UPS work tirelessly to deliver holiday packages on-time and damage-free. 

As of Dec. 24, UPS had shipped 2,000 more trailers via BNSF during Peak than it had the year prior. Moreover, of the 51 million packages handled by BNSF, 99.9 percent of them were delivered on time by UPS — a tremendous feat considering BNSF handles 50 percent of Brown’s intermodal shipments and that railroad traffic is at an all-time high.

In spite of numerous unprecedented challenges, Team BNSF’s performance was outstanding, says BNSF’s Jim Gordon, director, UPS. And there were challenges. Midway through Peak, a massive boulder fell onto and damaged the tracks in central Montana. But BNSF’s Maintenance of Way employees blasted the rock, repaired the rails, and BNSF was able to save service.

"UPS actually called me halfway through Peak to tell me that the other railroads were having service difficulties due to broken rails. They wanted to know why BNSF wasn’t having any broken rails," Gordon says. "The fact is that our Maintenance of Way crews and Operations teams were so fast to fix any problems and get the trains moving again, to UPS it seemed like there were none to begin with."

In Havre, Mont., after a defective car was uncoupled, extreme cold temperatures made it difficult to put the train back together, forcing the personnel there to solve the problem by splitting the train into two. Both sections of the train arrived in Portland in time to save service. BNSF’s St. Paul, Minn., and Portland, Ore., hubs as well as others across the system worked similar near-miracles, doing whatever it took to save service.

Given the challenges BNSF faced in 2005, including unprecedented volumes and extreme weather conditions, everyone at BNSF should be very proud of our 2005 Peak performance, notes Gordon.

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