The DFW distribution and 3PL landscape: inland ports, rail hubs, air cargo and foreign-trade zones

Dallas–Fort Worth moves freight through a handful of large, well-defined places rather than one port. Far north Fort Worth has an industrial airport and a rail yard. Between the two cities sits a passenger airport that, with Alliance, handles most of the region’s air cargo, according to NCTCOG. South of downtown Dallas is a rail-served inland port. The Dallas Regional Chamber counts five foreign-trade zones in the area in 2026, and this guide looks at two of them. A regional planning agency tracks how all of it fits together.

This guide maps those places in one page, with every figure dated and linked to where it came from. It is organized by hub rather than by city, because freight follows corridors and not city limits. Facts change, so each one carries the year of its source. The whole page is rechecked every six months.

The hubs at a glance

The Alliance area of north Fort Worth

In far north Fort Worth, the Alliance area is built around an airport that serves industry rather than passenger airlines. The Dallas Regional Chamber’s 2026 economic development guide calls the 9,600-acre logistics hub there “the nation’s premier inland port” and places it within a 27,000-acre development (Dallas Regional Chamber, 2026). The same guide describes Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport as an industrial and corporate airport. It lists a railroad’s intermodal hub there along with a large online retailer’s regional air hub, a parcel carrier’s regional sort hub and another parcel carrier’s ground hub. It also notes two Class I railroads and Interstate 35W, which the chamber describes as connecting Mexico to Canada.

Those descriptions come from the chamber, and the superlatives are the chamber’s own. They are useful mainly as a list of what sits inside one development: a runway, an intermodal rail yard, parcel sort buildings and a large stock of warehouses, all within a short truck move of each other.

Foreign-Trade Zone No. 196

The foreign-trade zone at Alliance is FTZ 196. The FTZ Board’s public records list a corporation as its grantee and give its service area as the Alliance Corridor area of Denton and Tarrant counties (FTZ Board OFIS, FTZ 196). The same record shows the zone approved on August 31, 1993, by Board Order 651. On the day this guide was reviewed, OFIS showed about 266.61 activated acres across its active sites.

The zone has a long record of ranking claims. In January 2010, the developer of the Alliance area said FTZ 196 had been the top general-purpose foreign-trade zone in the country by value of foreign goods admitted for a third straight year, at $5.357 billion, citing the FTZ Board’s annual report to Congress, which the release links as the 2008 report (developer news release, January 2010). Treat that as a dated historical figure, not a current ranking.

The Alliance intermodal yard

The rail yard is the other half of the Alliance picture. A 2024 rail trade press article says a predecessor of one of the region’s two Class I railroads opened the Alliance intermodal facility in Haslet in 1994, built specifically for intermodal traffic (rail trade press, August 2024). The same article puts the facility at nearly 500 acres. This guide does not quote how many containers it handles a year, because the railroad does not publish a current figure we could confirm.

The Alliance Logistics District (November 2025)

The newest piece of the Alliance picture is a set of local rules rather than a building. Fort Worth City Council approved the Alliance Logistics District on November 11, 2025, in a partnership with the developer of the Alliance area and the railroad that runs the Alliance yard (regional business news, November 2025). The district covers nearly 1,400 acres in the Alliance area. Within it, companies may run semi- and fully autonomous vehicles on district roadways in the freight corridor. Private yard trucks may move freight between the railroad’s intermodal yard and district warehouses without a commercial driver’s license. Heavy-haul loads over 80,000 pounds may cross district roads without special-use permits. The same report says a $20 million heavy-haul bridge over FM-156 is slated for completion by late 2026.

DFW International Airport

DFW International Airport is best known for passengers, but NCTCOG notes that it and Alliance handle most of the region’s air cargo (NCTCOG). The airport said it moved one million U.S. tons of cargo in calendar year 2021, in an April 2022 announcement (DFW Airport, April 2022). DFW posts passenger, operations and cargo statistics every month, about 45 days after each month closes (DFW Airport statistics). Readers who need a current tonnage figure should take it from there rather than from secondary reports.

Trade value tells a different part of the story. The Texas Comptroller’s 2024 port-of-entry snapshot reports $62.6 billion in trade through DFW International Airport in 2024, made up of $28.1 billion in exports and $34.5 billion in imports (Texas Comptroller, 2024). The snapshot names China, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam as top trading partners. Electronics and machinery lead both imports and exports. The Comptroller’s tonnage figure measures something different from the airport’s own cargo count, so the two should not be compared side by side.

Foreign-Trade Zone No. 39

The Dallas Regional Chamber’s 2026 guide counts five foreign-trade zones in the DFW area (Dallas Regional Chamber, 2026). FTZ 39 has the widest service area of the two covered here. Its grantee is the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Board. A Federal Register notice published in April 2026 recounts its history: approval on August 17, 1978 (Board Order 133), reorganization in 2010 under a newer set of zone rules, then service-area expansions in 2014 and 2023 (Federal Register, B-38-2026). The current service area covers Dallas, Tarrant, Kaufman, Collin, Grayson, Denton, Hunt and Hill counties.

That same notice, docketed on April 7, 2026, describes an application to add Parker, Palo Pinto and Jack counties. When this guide was reviewed on October 30, 2026, the FTZ Board’s OFIS listed that application as in review (FTZ Board OFIS, FTZ 39). OFIS also showed about 792.51 activated acres against the zone’s 2,000-acre activation limit, spread over 16 active sites that include the airport itself and a site in Fort Worth.

Zone status is site by site. Whether a given company, building or product can use a zone is a question for a licensed customs broker or the zone’s grantee, not for a map.

The International Inland Port of Dallas

South of downtown Dallas, a second inland port grew around a railroad rather than an airport. The North Central Texas Council of Governments describes the International Inland Port of Dallas as a 7,500-acre area in South Dallas that includes a major railroad’s South Dallas intermodal facility along with warehouses (NCTCOG).

The Dallas Regional Chamber’s 2026 guide calls the same area the southern Dallas County inland port and says it spans 7,500 acres and five cities (Dallas Regional Chamber, 2026). It lists direct access to Interstates 20, 35E and 45. It also lists the railroad’s 360-acre Dallas intermodal terminal, which the chamber says gives access to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The chamber counts more than 25 million square feet of occupied or build-to-suit warehouse, industrial, distribution and manufacturing space there. FTZ 39 and Triple Freeport tax treatment are both available in the area, according to the same guide.

For a sense of the boundaries, a 2018 regional business news report places the inland port on land south of Interstate 20, between Interstate 35 on the west and Interstate 45 on the east (regional business news, November 2018). That description is several years old, and the area has kept building out since, so read it as a rough outline.

NCTCOG freight planning

The North Central Texas Council of Governments is the regional planning agency for the area, and its transportation department runs a freight program. What it publishes is the closest thing the region has to a shared freight reference.

• Freight North Texas. The regional freight plan, updated in 2022. NCTCOG says it includes an updated analysis of the current freight system, performance measures and recommendations for future policies, programs, projects and studies (NCTCOG, Freight North Texas).
• Freight policies and land use. The same page points to 13 freight policies in the Mobility 2045 Update (2022) and a 2022 freight land use analysis that identifies problem areas and regional trends.
• Studies still to come. NCTCOG lists proposed follow-up work, among them a truck bottleneck study, an air cargo analysis and a commodity flow model.
• Maps and data. The general freight planning page carries a freight facilities map and notes that most of the region’s air cargo moves through DFW and Alliance airports (NCTCOG).
• The Regional Freight Advisory Committee. NCTCOG staff set up the committee in September 2011 as a forum where public and private freight interests share information (NCTCOG, RFAC). The page also links a freight fact sheet among NCTCOG’s freight publications.

What the density means inside the buildings

A map like this one shows where freight moves. It doesn’t show the paperwork that moves with it. Containers that leave a rail ramp at Alliance or southern Dallas County end up as receiving notices at someone’s dock. Most loads out of a DFW warehouse start as an order someone keyed and end as a bill someone checked. Delivery paperwork comes back as a scan, a photo or a PDF. Someone has to match it to the right shipment before the invoice can go out.

The more freight a region handles, the more of that work lands in inboxes. The people doing it are often a small office team at a distributor, a 3PL or a carrier. They know which customer uses which unit of measure and which client always sends the packing list late. When volume rises, the paperwork doesn’t get harder. There is simply more of it, and it waits longer. Orders get entered the next morning. Receipts get keyed after the truck is already unloaded. Billing slips to the end of the month.

That is the work Automation Results takes off teams in Dallas–Fort Worth: paperwork that reaches an inbox is read and checked the way your team checks it. Anything unclear goes to a person with the question marked.

Teams that get this work under control tend to notice a few changes. Fewer orders sit unread overnight. Fewer receiving surprises turn up at the dock. Fewer billing disputes trace back to a typo. And the person who knows every customer’s quirks spends less of the day retyping and more of it on the orders that actually need judgment.

For the details by job, see the guides on 3PL order processing, ASN and receiving, 3PL billing and proof of delivery.

About this guide

Every figure here comes from a public source linked in the same paragraph and listed below, accessed on October 30, 2026. Superlatives and rankings are quoted from the organizations that made them, with their dates. Nothing here is customs, tax or site-selection advice. The guide is reviewed every six months. It is also updated when DFW Airport publishes annual cargo totals, when the FTZ Board rules on the FTZ 39 expansion or when NCTCOG updates its freight plan.