Union Pacific Railroad and Norfolk Southern Railway are commencing an intermodal train service between Los Angeles and the Southeast in a bid to raise capacity and expand on intermodal rail services from Los Angeles to the US south east.

The Los Angeles-Atlanta service is to complement the existing BlueStreak service, a joint statement said.

To support the launch of the service, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern plan to increase train capacity and improve service between Union Pacific's Los Angeles terminals and Norfolk Southern-serviced terminals in Atlanta, Charlotte, Greensboro, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston (South Carolina) and Miami.

UP and NS are also reducing the transit time for their BlueStreak intermodal service between Los Angeles and Atlanta by almost half a day, starting from February 19.

"These new services will offer customers higher quality shipping options in this rapidly growing corridor and build on the premier BlueStreak services that UP and NS have been running for more than five years," said Don Seale, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Norfolk Southern.

UP and NS will also begin shifting domestic and international traffic to a new, shorter route over the Shreveport gateway in the third-quarter. This shift will begin with the completion of the first phase of improvements on the Meridian Speedway. In establishing this new route, UP and NS said they will eliminate almost 150 route miles from the existing route, and remove freight from the Memphis gateway.