(The followings tory by Eric Smith appeared on the Daily News website on April 22, 2010.)
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Memphis has long been a railroad town.
The city’s central location and the availability of other transport modes like the Mississippi River made it a popular choice with Class I railroads, five of which now have extensive intermodal and switching operations here.
Another chapter in Memphis’ rail transportation story began Wednesday when BNSF Railway Co. formally opened its new and improved facility at Lamar Avenue and Shelby Drive.
The Fort Worth, Texas-based company earlier this year put the finishing touches on $200 million worth of upgrades at the yard, dubbed the Memphis Intermodal Facility, where cargo is transferred between trains and trucks.
The renovation saw the facility grow to 185 acres and capacity increase from 250,000 lifts a year to 600,000 with room to bump that number up to 1 million should the railroad add more parallel tracks and cranes in the future.
Vann Cunningham, BNSF’s assistant vice president for economic development, said the yard is now the railroad’s 10th largest operation.
“Clearly Memphis is a key part of our system and certainly it is the center point for any activity and supportive market in the Southeast,” he said. “It is a major part of our business and we expect it to continue to grow. Memphis is ideally located in terms of accessing the southeastern markets.”
The cargo moved through Memphis is 50 percent domestic and 50 percent international, both of which are growing at equal rates as the economy recovers, Cunningham said. BNSF, the largest intermodal operator in the nation, started planning to renovate its terminal in 2002 because of the growing volume of cargo from California ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
The railroad initially considered developing a new facility where it wouldn’t be landlocked. BNSF conducted what Cunningham called “an extensive site search in a 50-mile radius around Memphis” in 2002 and 2003.
The company considered locales in Marion, Ark., and Marshall County, Miss., before deciding to expand its current facility.
“We felt like this was the best place to be, but it was questionable as to whether or not we’d be able to do it because we were landlocked at the time,” he said.
The company began buying land around its Tennessee Yard, as it was then known, in 2004 and started construction on the new 185-acre footprint in 2005.
BNSF’s expanded yard has 7,400 feet of track underneath the cranes, 2,000 parking spaces for truck chasses and the ability to stack more than 6,000 40-foot containers.
The terminal, whose work force totals 72 BNSF employees, also includes four new buildings: an administration building fronting Lamar Avenue, a locker room facility for employees fronting Shelby Drive, a truck maintenance facility and a smaller checkpoint building.
For all the renovations made at the site, however, the biggest change came with the arrival of eight new cranes. Five of them lift containers on and off the rail cars, and the other three stack containers and transfer them within the yard.
At 90 feet tall, the production cranes are twice the height of the old ones. What’s important about the increased size is all the cranes work in concert to perform the yard’s heavy lifting. That reduces emissions because it cuts down the number of trucks that move throughout the facility, eliminating the need for trucks to move containers.
Also, because the cranes are electric (the old ones ran on diesel), the terminal has further shrunk its carbon footprint.
Cunningham touted the efforts of the Greater Memphis Chamber and local and state governments for helping the railroad move forward with its expansion plan.
The expansion is further proof of Memphis’ role as a rail nexus and one of just three cities with five Class I railroads.
Memphis’ rail resume is impressive: Union Pacific Corp. in 1998 opened a regional intermodal yard across the Mississippi River in Marion. Canadian National Railway Co. and CSX Corp. in 2005 opened a joint intermodal terminal called Intermodal Gateway-Memphis at Frank C. Pidgeon Industrial Park near Downtown Memphis.
And Norfolk Southern Corp. in July announced plans to build a $112 million intermodal terminal in Rossville, in neighboring Fayette County.