Pacific National is offering increased capacity on its intermodal containerised services right throughout the festive season to help its customers with the Christmas rush. 

Australia’s largest private freight rail operator is launching an additional service called Seasonalexclusive, to help support the national supply chain during the busy holiday period.  

The initiative follows a surge in demand for additional containerised rail freight services, due to a combination of a shift from road to rail haulage during the pandemic, a massive increase in online shopping, and the intensity of buying activity leading into the peak Christmas season. 

The extra capacity will be available on east-west routes to Perth and on the Melbourne-Brisbane freight corridors between 25 December, 2021 and 1 January, 2022. These are services which would not historically run during this time. 

Pacific National’s Chief Commercial Officer, Andrew Thomson, says the company is pleased to be offering Seasonalexclusive for the first time to customers to assist them in meeting demand. 

“We’ve developed this offer more than five weeks out from Christmas and look forward to working with our customers to deliver the additional intermodal capacity they need to move more volumes this holiday season, particularly given some of the recent wet weather impacts on the broader supply chain,” he said. 

This comes as Pacific National moves to increase capacity for container movements on rail by more than a third in less than three years, compared to pre-pandemic levels. 

The company has committed to a further increase in containerised service capacity of 10 per cent by March next year, and a further five per cent by September 2022.