BRG’s Gonnella on ‘Bringing the Operation to the Next Level’

Shariff Gonella

OmniTRAX, an affiliate of The Broe Group, recently named former Amazon global supply chain executive Shariff Gonnella as President of the Brownsville & Rio Grande International Railway, LLC (BRG). Gonnella succeeded Norma Torres, a 2021 Railway Age Women in Rail honoree, who will retire at the end of this year after nearly 35 years.

The 45-mile BRG provides rail service to all facilities within the 40,000-acre Brownsville Navigation District at the Port of Brownsville at the southern tip of Texas. Traffic includes steel, agricultural products, food products and general commodities. BRG has U.S./Mexico cross-border interchanges with Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific Kansas City and describes itself as “a strategic import and export artery between the U.S. and Mexico with the capacity to become a complementary trade corridor that offers relief from the growing capacity strains at the Port of Laredo,” which in 2023 “eclipsed volumes at the ports of Los Angeles and Chicago.”

Torres started in August 1989 as a contract employee at BRG, which at the time was part of the Port of Brownsville. The railroad operated weekdays only with 12 employees and handled 3,600 carloads per year. Torres was hired as a fulltime railroad employee on Jan. 1, 1990. Torres was promoted from Customer Service Representative to Vice President in 1993. In 2001, she was promoted to President and COO. OmniTRAX took over the operation and changed the name to Brownsville & Rio Grande International Railway LLC on August 12, 2014. BRG has experienced major volume growth since then: 36,550 carloads in 2014 grew to 60,000 in 2021 and then 72,000 in 2022.

Gonnella, a native of Venezuela, has an extensive supply chain background with global experience. “My background has been primarily in a supply chain and logistics on the airline side of the business,” he told Railway Age. “I started my career working for air freight companies with Singapore Airlines, where my role was primarily opening new regions. That’s how I became familiar with the Mexico and Latin America trade supply chains. For a while, I was based in Miami, focusing on supply chains among Asian, European, North American and Latin American countries, primarily Brazil and Colombia, back when Brazil was a booming economy in Latin America. Then I retuned to the air freight industry, working for Cargolux Airlines, the fifth-largest cargo carrier in the world, based out of Luxembourg. At Amazon, I oversaw international air freight expansion.”

At BRG, which Gonnella joined on Aug. 1, 2023, “We’re looking for areas where can we grow and bring the operation to the next level,” he says. “Since OmniTRAX took over in 2014, they’ve been finding ways to improve customer service quality and overall volume, making sure that we’re able to continue to manage the growth that the region is bringing overall. The primary products moved through the Port of Brownsville are steel slab plates and coils and rolled steel pipe. We’re also moving petroleum products such as lubricants, jet fuel, gasoline and diesel, as well as aluminum, machinery, wind turbine blades and limestone, and some intermodal. We do a lot of truck/rail transloading for materials that go to construction sites.

“Most of our is traffic now is outbound to Mexico because there’s a lot of manufacturing there. The Maquiladoras and automobile plants need raw materials. But now, near-shoring, a major impetus for the merger of the Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern, has changed that. CPKC is leveraging that growing market in Mexico. I was recently in Monterrey visiting some of our customers and partners. We see a lot of investment in companies due to the near-shoring. They’re positioning themselves in the northern part of Mexico, close to Monterrey primarily, and they want to take advantage of the proximity to the U.S. and the benefits of moving products cross-border, with direct access into the U.S. market.

“Some of the existing gateways are getting congested, from a port perspective. Altamira is an alternative to an entry port, and the feedback we’ve been getting is that Altamira is also getting congested. Shippers are looking at the Port of Brownsville, which is also served by BNSF, as an alternative or even a primary port of entry based on its geographical position and the benefits that it brings to avoid some of the congestion they’re seeing at Altamira or Laredo, with the booming economy we see in South Texas.”