Maersk and Canadian Pacific to Build and Operate a Transload and Distribution Facility

Maersk and Canadian Pacific will build and operate a transload and distribution facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, according to an announcement Tuesday. It is slated to be operational in 2021. Canadian Pacific will shuttle containers to and from port terminals, taking the reliance off of trucks, according to the announcement. And because the facility will be an expansion of Canadian Pacific's intermodal center, the rail infrastructure is already in place, Maersk said. "We can now offer more responsiveness to the pace of business by giving supply chain leaders more control of order timing/fulfillment through inland routing flexibility, better velocity gained from one day savings of rail versus truck and cost savings through seamless transload operations into domestic 53’ trailers," Omar Shamsie, president of Maersk Canada, said in a statement. The aim with the Maersk-Canadian Pacific partnership is "to simplify the current situation" and reduce "multi-modal handoffs," Shamsie said, referring to an environment with booming e-commerce and high spot rates in the trucking market.