From Boxcars to a Billion-Dollar Network
Key takeaways
- From Boxcars to a Billion-Dollar Network Fastfrate and CP Rail [Credit: Fastfrate] Matt Herr Tue, May 26, 2026 at 10:40 PM GMT+7 9 min read In 1966, Canadian Pacific Railway had a problem.
- “We’ve been a favored son of CP Rail since the beginning,” Tepper said in an interview with FreightWaves. “Our facilities began as a boxcar operation which provided one-way moves and no balance requirements.”
- The first major turning point came in the late 1990s.
From Boxcars to a Billion-Dollar Network Fastfrate and CP Rail [Credit: Fastfrate] Matt Herr Tue, May 26, 2026 at 10:40 PM GMT+7 9 min read In 1966, Canadian Pacific Railway had a problem. Empty boxcars were piling up in Eastern Canada with no payload for the return trip west. The solution was a small freight company called Fastfrate, created specifically to fill those cars with less-than-truckload shipments bound for Western Canada.
Six decades later, that single-service operation has become one of North America’s largest privately held supply chain providers as a group of seven companies spanning intermodal, truckload, drayage, warehousing, e-commerce fulfillment, final-mile delivery, international freight forwarding, and customs brokerage, operating across more than 46 locations in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
The transformation was orchestrated over a period of decades by Ron Tepper, the executive chairman who first acquired Fastfrate in 1994 and has guided every major inflection point since, including selling to private equity, buying the company back, and assembling an acquisition portfolio that has reshaped what the company can offer shippers across the continent.