2001 Top 100

It says Canadian National Railway on his business card, but Thierry Lysiak spends his day thinking like a trucker. “We operate a large fleet of trailers, we have owner-operators to move them, we do door-to-door work, and we compete for truckload freight,” says Lysiak, account manager for CN’s RoadRailer short-haul intermodal division. “We’re a trucking operation. We just don’t send freight 300 miles up and down the highway.”

It goes mostly by rail. In 1999, CN bought 200 53-foot RoadRailer trailers and 130 rail bogies from Wabash National of Lafayette, Ind. The 4000-cubic-foot, structurally reinforced trailers can travel on highway tires or rail bogies, converting from one mode to the other in minutes at terminals that require only gravel or pavement up to the height of the rails.

With enough capacity to haul 125 trailers per train, CN began Montreal-Toronto service in August 1999, offering overnight transit five days a week. A year later, the railway bought 200 more trailers and added next-morning service between Toronto and Chicago (second-morning between Montreal and Chicago). There are opportunities to build the business to Atlantic Canada, Memphis, New Orleans, and Mexico using owned and affiliated lines.

To compete with full-load, over-the-road trucking companies, Lysiak and RoadRailer group manager Mark Lerner have had to confront the glaring shortcomings of traditional rail transportation-imprecise delivery times, a jarring ride, and spotty customer service.

Lysiak points out that RoadRailer has its own terminals, freight processing system, equipment, and service schedule. About 30 owner-operators handle local pickup and delivery work.

“For sure, some customers have been burned by railroads in the past,” Lysiak admits. “A few years ago, railroads were measuring performance in terms of days. Now we measure it in hours. One day, it will be measured in minutes.” He adds that CN will begin to offer RoadRailer customers satellite-based trailer tracking and access to real-time proof of delivery via the Internet-services more commonly provided by truck fleets.

While rival CP Rail’s short-haul intermodal service-Expressway-sees truckers as customers, there’s little doubt that CN sees them as competition. RoadRailer, after all, solicits general freight business that would otherwise travel by truck. With qualified drivers still in short supply and operating costs on the rise, Lerner says, trucking companies should see RoadRailer as an opportunity and a convenience.

“Clearly there are some (line-haul carriers) who see us as potential help,” he says. “They see that CN is providing the assets, service, and drivers. They say, ‘Why not take our truck assets and move them into another lucrative lane, give CN the (Toronto-Montreal) lane, and have our mark-up on it?’ They see us as a way to quickly expand their capacity with a product that’s neutral to the shipper.”