J.B. Hunt Transport Services is growing its transloading footprint with new operations in Tacoma, Washington, and Laredo, Texas, the company announced Monday.
The Lowell, Arkansas-based carrier said the expansion brings four of the U.S.’s top ocean ports and a major land port of entry within reach of its relatively nascent transloading services, which transfer customers’ international cargo to trucks and trains for domestic transport.
“By growing the reach of our transload service and managing the drayage and loading processes for our customers, we can provide new levels of process oversight and visibility into their freight activity, particularly the critical first mile segment,” Darren Field, J.B. Hunt president of intermodal and executive vice president, said in a statement.
The Pacific Northwest facility will handle freight arriving at the Seattle and Tacoma ports in a bid to alleviate supply chain congestion stemming from the surge in shipping demand over the past few years, the company said in the announcement. The facility will use the direct, container-only joint service between Tacoma and Chicago, which J.B. Hunt launched with BNSF in August. It is expected to open by November.
The facility in Laredo, which recently started operations in the border city, aims to take advantage of any growth in nearshored operations by facilitating inbound and outbound cross-border shipping. Transloading services are often required for freight entering and exiting the U.S. because of regulatory requirements, carrier and driver availability and domestic capacity demand, according to the company.
J.B. Hunt expanded its transload footprint coast-to-coast this year after opening its first company-owned transload facility in New York in November 2021. The carrier added transload operations in Commerce, California, in July to handle Los Angeles and Long Beach cargo.
