The News
Amazon is giving its sellers a way to send East Coast inventory through Los Angeles and onto a train.
The new option, Standard Ocean Express, sits inside Seller Managed Placement, the Amazon Global Logistics service that ships sellers’ ocean freight straight to Amazon’s regional warehouses. Amazon announced it in a Sept. 11 post on its seller forums. Freight booked to the East Coast arrives at the Port of Los Angeles and goes by direct rail to Amazon’s East Coast fulfillment centers.
Amazon says the route is faster than standard routing but has not said by how much or what it costs. Sellers pick the option in their usual booking flow, with no new paperwork, and see the rate next to an estimated delivery window.
Why It Matters
Importers moving Asian goods to the East Coast have two routes. One is an all-water sailing to New York, Norfolk or Savannah. The other is a cheaper Pacific crossing followed by a train.
Amazon now makes that call for any seller who ticks the box, while the railroads sell the same trade to everyone else. The choice comes down to whether the ocean saving is worth the extra days a container waits at the port for its train.
Why Now
Three changes this year favor Los Angeles.
Ocean rates: A 40-foot container from Shanghai costs $2,682 more to New York than to Los Angeles, on Drewry’s Sept. 17 index. A year ago, the gap was $1,065. Shippers who can land on the West Coast “must seriously consider it because there is dramatic savings potential, even if it means a heavier reliance on truck and rail to reach the final destination,” Xeneta’s chief analyst Peter Sand said.
Panama Canal: Drought cut daily transits to 32 on Sept. 15, and ships now have to sail lighter to cross.
Trucking: Long-haul truckload prices rose 13.9% in the year to August, while rail freight prices rose 1.4%, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Diesel hit a record $6.529 a gallon last week.
Who Else
The railroads started selling faster service out of Southern California a year before Amazon did. Four launches came between July and November 2025.
BNSF: An expedited train from its Hobart yard in Los Angeles to Houston, 24 hours faster than its standard service. Started in July.
Union Pacific: A three-day service from the Inland Empire to Chicago, which it said is up to 20% faster than current offerings. Started in September.
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern: A handoff at Kansas City that saves up to 25 hours between Southern California and the Kansas City terminal. Started in October.
BNSF and CSX: Joint service from Los Angeles to nine eastern markets, including Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, Columbus and Louisville, cutting 22 to 52 hours depending on the lane. Started in November.
All four are domestic services, built to win freight from trucks. Import freight gets onto them after it is unloaded from ocean containers and repacked into 53-foot domestic boxes near the ports.
Amazon also has its own equipment. Its rail fleet has grown to 24,000 containers from 5,000 in 2022, FreightWaves reported.
Pushback
The ocean saving is real, but four things work against the rail route.
Port wait: Rail containers at Los Angeles and Long Beach waited an average of 6.75 days for their train in August, up from 4.98 days a year earlier, according to the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association’s monthly count. Containers leaving by truck waited 2.95 days.
East Coast trains: The Port of Virginia and CSX started a five-day service to Indianapolis in August that skips Chicago. Containers there wait 35 to 49 hours for rail, per Supply Chain Dive. Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky are now in reach of new trains from both coasts.
Import volume: Union Pacific’s international intermodal volume, the ocean containers it carries, fell 14% in the second quarter. The railroad blamed the comparison with last year’s tariff rush. Its growth came from domestic boxes taking freight from trucks.
Regulator: The Surface Transportation Board voted Sept. 18 to keep reviewing the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger. Board member Richard Kloster wrote that the railroads lean on intermodal gains in a market he called “already competitive.”
What’s Next
The first test is Amazon’s own delivery windows: whether the dates sellers see at booking hold through peak season. The Pacific Merchant Shipping Association’s September dwell count, due in mid-October, will show whether the rail wait eases as the import rush fades. Opening comments on the UP-NS merger are due Nov. 18.
