U.S. West Coast ports are being "held hostage" by longshore labor. So says one noted economist.

Nearly everything in our lives is impacted by rail, from food products to chemicals and energy. Total U.S. weekly rail freight traffic for one week in January 2015 was 548,055 carloads and intermodal units, up 4.1 percent compared with the same week last year, as reported by the Association of American Railroads.

The Kuehne & Nagel Group has completed its acquisition of 100 percent of the shares of ReTrans Inc., a U.S.-based provider of multimodal transportation services.