Skip to content
Search AI Powered
Human content, AI powered search.

Latest Stories

newsworthy

Florida East Coast to add Valdosta, Ga., to relay rail network

Expansion will take place early next year.

Mark Solomon
By Mark SolomonNov 14, 2011
Mark Solomon
Mark Solomon joined DC VELOCITY as senior editor in August 2008, and was promoted to his current position on January 1, 2015. He has spent more than 30 years in the transportation, logistics and supply chain management fields as a journalist and public relations professional. From 1989 to 1994, he worked in Washington as a reporter for the Journal of Commerce, covering the aviation and trucking industries, the Department of Transportation, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that, he worked for Traffic World for seven years in a similar role. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Solomon ran Media-Based Solutions, a public relations firm based in Atlanta. He graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in journalism from The American University in Washington, D.C.
See Full Bio

Florida East Coast Railway Co. (FEC) said today it would add Valdosta, Ga., to its so-called relay rail network, which allows truckers to drop off trailerloads with the FEC and have the railroad, rather than the truckers, transport the freight down the Florida peninsula to Miami. The expansion will take place early next year, the railroad said.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based FEC already operates such a service at Savannah, where truckers delivering loads originating in the Midwest and Southeast drop their loads with FEC at the Georgia city. FEC then trucks the trailer to its railhead in Jacksonville, where it is transloaded onto one of its trains for the 350-mile overnight trip to Miami. The trucker can then pick up a trailer in Savannah, a major manufacturing and distribution center, for the westbound return trip. Once the trailer is offloaded in Miami, FEC returns the empty equipment to Savannah.

FEC said the service eliminates the need for a trucker to use its own equipment for the costly journey down Florida's Eastern seaboard. The trucker also doesn't have to worry about finding a compensatory load to move northbound, often a difficult proposition because of the dearth of manufacturing and distribution locations in Central and South Florida, regions known more for tourism than industry.

James L. Hertwig, FEC's president and CEO, said at a media breakfast today that Valdosta was added to the network to give truckers and their customers another node inside Georgia that is reasonably close to the FEC railhead in Jacksonville. Valdosta is 185 miles southwest of Savannah and about 130 miles from Jacksonville.

Hertwig said the relay service in Valdosta would operate in the same manner as its Savannah counterpart. Hertwig spoke in Atlanta at the joint annual meeting of the National Industrial Transportation League, the Intermodal Association of North America, and the Transportation Intermediaries Association.

ArticleTransportationRail
florida east coast railway
ArticleTransportationRail
florida east coast railway

The Latest

reagan national DCA airport pic
Disaster Response

Reagan National airport plans to reopen today after deadly crash

More Stories

How clever is that chatbot?

Oh, you work in logistics, too? Then you’ve probably met my friends Truedi, Lumi, and Roger.

No, you haven’t swapped business cards with those guys or eaten appetizers together at a trade-show social hour. But the chances are good that you’ve had conversations with them. That’s because they’re the online chatbots “employed” by three companies operating in the supply chain arena—TrueCommerce, Blue Yonder, and Truckstop. And there’s more where they came from. A number of other logistics-focused companies—like ChargePoint, Packsize, FedEx, and Inspectorio—have also jumped in the game.

Keep ReadingShow less

Featured

NMFTA to release proposed freight classification changes this week
Featured

NMFTA to release proposed freight classification changes this week

diagram of lithium-ion battery in EV
Batteries/Chargers/Motors/Fuel

Lithium refinery to build $1.2 billion factory in Oklahoma

a blurred image of a forklift in a warehouse
Material Handling

Lift Truck Roundtable: An inside look at a volatile market

cargo handling cranes at a port
Cranes

Port of Savannah got four more ship-to-shore cranes on Saturday

a port yard with artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence

​Putting artificial intelligence to work

warehouse workers handling boxes
Supply Chain Optimization Software

Aptean picks up fellow supply chain software vendor Logility

White House in washington DC

Experts: U.S. companies need strategies to pay costs of Trump tariffs

With the hourglass dwindling before steep tariffs threatened by the new Trump Administration will impose new taxes on U.S. companies importing goods from abroad, organizations need to deploy strategies to handle those spiraling costs.

American companies with far-flung supply chains have been hanging for weeks in a “wait-and-see” situation to learn if they will have to pay increased fees to U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement agents for every container they import from certain nations. After paying those levies, companies face the stark choice of either cutting their own profit margins or passing the increased cost on to U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices.

Keep ReadingShow less
phone screen of online grocery order

Houchens Food Group taps eGrowcery for e-com grocery tech

Grocery shoppers at select IGA, Price Less, and Food Giant stores will soon be able to use an upgraded in-store digital commerce experience, since store chain operator Houchens Food Group said it would deploy technology from eGrowcery, provider of a retail food industry white-label digital commerce platform.

Kentucky-based Houchens Food Group, which owns and operates more than 400 grocery, convenience, hardware/DIY, and foodservice locations in 15 states, said the move would empower retailers to rethink how and when to engage their shoppers best.

Keep ReadingShow less
solar panels in a field

J.B. Hunt launches solar farm to power its three HQ buildings

Supply chain solution provider J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. has launched a large-scale solar facility that will generate enough electricity to offset up to 80% of the power used by its three main corporate campus buildings in Lowell, Arkansas.

The 40-acre solar facility in Gentry, Arkansas, includes nearly 18,000 solar panels and 10,000-plus bi-facial solar modules to capture sunlight, which is then converted to electricity and transmitted to a nearby electric grid for Carroll County Electric. The facility will produce approximately 9.3M kWh annually and utilize net metering, which helps transfer surplus power onto the power grid.

Keep ReadingShow less
a drone flying in a warehouse

Geodis goes airborne to speed cycle counts

As a contract provider of warehousing, logistics, and supply chain solutions, Geodis often has to provide customized services for clients.

That was the case recently when one of its customers asked Geodis to up its inventory monitoring game—specifically, to begin conducting quarterly cycle counts of the goods it stored at a Geodis site. Trouble was, performing more frequent counts would be something of a burden for the facility, which still conducted inventory counts manually—a process that was tedious and, depending on what else the team needed to accomplish, sometimes required overtime.

Keep ReadingShow less
Copyright ©2025.