FreightWaves Today | September 21

Craig Fuller (0:35)

It's Monday, welcome to FreightWaves Today.

Julie, nice relaxing weekend. It's football is continuing to happen. Speaking of football, we're gonna be at the Green Bay Packers on Thursday.

Julie Johnsson (0:47)

So exciting, yes. I'm especially thrilled that we're doing the show on set in Green Bay, because I went to grade school in Green Bay and high school there.

Craig Fuller (0:54)

It's like going back home, is that what it is?

Julie Johnsson (0:56)

It does feel like going back home and getting to feature a town I love a little bit. So I'm close to my heart. I'm excited that we get to do that.

Craig Fuller (1:04)

Speaking of Green Bay, we have the Chief Corporate Development Officer of Paper Transport, a Green Bay home team, or home company, I should say, considering they are part of the home team.

But they're on today. We have Ben Schill, who's gonna talk about, they do the logistics for Green Bay Packers, and he's gonna give us the overview of that and other sort of developments in the market. We're gonna talk about location, site selection, and where companies are looking to expand to, where they're looking at operations, get into autonomous and yard automation, and we're gonna finish up with energy. Obviously, an important topic around diesel, what's happening. Saudi Arabia attack is obviously relevant. But I think there's been some big news over the weekend, particularly, did you hear about this train story where they took a flaming van and basically put it on the tracks to slow the train or stop the train, and so they could break into the train?

Julie Johnsson (2:04)

And then they caught one of the rail cars on fire, one of the open containers. And so I read through it and there weren't a ton of details because it's still being investigated and no one's been arrested yet based on what I read in the story. But yeah, so they tried to catch the train on fire in order to get it to stop so that they can steal things.

Craig Fuller (2:20)

It reminds me of those old west sort of movies where it's right out of Hollywood.

I mean, it's in California, but basically where they do everything they can to sort of stop the train so they could break into it so they could steal the cargo. This time, back in the 1800s, they were holding people up, going to the trains and robbing them. Now what they're doing is they're stopping the trains so they can get the cargo. It does feel a little bit of like Fast and Furious. Yeah, Wild, Wild West. Maybe it is a train version of this. Yeah. It is the Wild West. Literally, it took place in Riverside, California, which is a suburb of LA. I mean, it's down south, so crazy story.

Julie Johnsson (2:59)

It is really crazy. I think one of the quotes from one of the executives in the story was like, hey, this is not a victimless crime.

Luckily, no one was injured, the people working on the train or the firefighters who had to go to multiple locations in order to try to get to the right location where they could put it out, but there are goods that people need on these trains, and when they get stopped.

Craig Fuller (3:21)

Also, fire in California ends up causing, as we've seen, massive amounts of damage. I mean, the Los Angeles fire that happened a couple years ago, there are people who still have not been able to rebuild their homes due to those types of fires, so this is obviously something tragic. And one of the things that I think, as we've covered on the show, is that a lot of these freight crimes, cargo crimes, are connected to organized criminals and cartels, and they're doing it as essentially a way to just expand their criminal enterprise. And so this is really important. Matt Leffler and I talked on the show about the need for Corka, which is a bill that's trying to get through Congress, probably won't this session, but is essentially all about a fighting organized crime as it relates to Cario. So it has broader applications for all types of retail crime, but it's something that frankly we all would want to get passed so that we could mitigate and put these criminals out. One of the interesting things is that in Mexico, as we covered with Bill Stevens, Mexico has done a much better job, the railroads down there have done a much better job of securing it. We know how the cartels work in Mexico, but they actually do not see the same kind of losses we see in the US, which is sort of interesting, because truck crime is more common, truck hijacking is more common in Mexico, but the trains have a great track record of securing, they're using everything from drones to they have officers along the tracks.