(The following article by Jane Roberts was posted on the Memphis Commercial Appeal website on October 25.)
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — If you don’t feel the earth rumbling the next time you drive through Lamar and Shelby Drive, the radio’s on too loud.
BNSF Railway is up to its axles in one of the most ambitious expansions ever here, spending an estimated $100 million by 2008 to more than double the number of shipping containers it can move between railcar and truck here.
In Scott Jenkins’ office, the numbers take on the cloak of reality, aided by the rumble of trains.
“Right now, there are 2,500 intermodal containers in the BNSF system headed to Memphis,” he said early Monday morning.
“They’ll be arriving in town throughout the week. That’s actually down from the 3,000 we saw a few weeks ago.”
Jenkins is head of the intermodal operation here, giving him a front-row seat to the local drama of feeding America’s appetite for Asian imports.
In 2001, his crew moved 150,000 containers from rail car to truck. “Until then, it was the biggest year we had ever had,” he said.
It’s all ancient history now. In 2004, the number of containers jumped to 255,553 after BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) added 30 acres and 7,200 feet of track, giving its crane operators unfettered access to 250 containers at a time.
This year, BNSF projects it will transfer 310,000 containers in Memphis. By 2011, it will have enough infrastructure to handle a million, thanks in part to the construction that is totally altering the landscape at Lamar and Shelby.
“We’ll be adding six 8,000-foot lengths of track next to Lamar,” Jenkins says, pointing across a pocked moonscape that will take millions of tons of fill to level.
“We’ll also create parking for 2,500 extra containers,” he says, barreling the family vehicle up a 60-foot incline that will be flattened when the project is finished.
Two years ago, BNSF figured it had until 2020 to reach the 1-million container mark. It figured it would build its railcar trains outside Memphis, freeing up most of the Shelby Drive yard for intermodal.
But when the railroad’s overall business unexpectedly increased, it didn’t have room at other yards to build trains headed for Memphis. Instead, it started buying out its neighbors in 2005, extending its holdings in a swath along Lamar from Perkins on the north to Shelby Drive on the south.
The U.S. Department of Transportation expects freight traffic will grow more than 66 percent by 2020.
To meet the demand, railroads are in the midst of the largest capital improvement program since the 1920s, spending in excess of $8 billion this year laying track and improving infrastructure, a 21 percent increase over last year.
Last spring, for instance, Canadian National announced plans to invest $100 million in its 345-acre Johnston Yard in southwest Memphis, giving it by 2008 room to accommodate its Canada-Mexico business, where traffic is growing 8 to 10 percent a year.
Memphis, which has five Class 1 railroads, offers it a place outside the congestion in Chicago to stage trains and switch traffic through agreements with other railroads.
This month, BNSF announced a new partnership with CSX Railroad that will allow it to stage trains in Los Angeles headed directly for Atlanta, via Memphis, without stopping to reshuffle cars along the way.
“To me, the end solution is going to be government investment in the rail infrastructure,” said Robert Milner, a Memphis-based transportation expert.
“This system, the way it is currently organized, can’t work efficiently. In an analogy I love to steal, each railroad having its own intermodal terminal is parallel to each passenger airline having its own airport.”
It creates inefficiencies, he said, including thousands of truck trips a year in Memphis to pick up containers at one rail yard and transfer them to another.
With the shortage of truck drivers and the demand for cheap consumer goods, the growth for railroads looks robust for years, Milner said.
“There’s never going to be enough truck drivers, and there’s never going to be enough highways with the speed automobile traffic is growing.”