(The following story by Jane Roberts appeared on the Memphis Commercial Appeal website on July 23.)
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — As early as April 1, the best place to see Memphis’s distribution muscle will be at Lamar and Shelby Drive.
If you have trouble spotting the action, look for five nine-story cranes, the centerpieces of BNSF Railway’s $100 million-plus intermodal investment in southeast Memphis.
On Tuesday, tour buses full of more than 100 out-of-town customers — including Wal-Mart, Target, Kimberly Clark and Colgate-Palmolive — snaked through the 185-acre facility, weaving around heavy equipment and across graded plains where BNSF is preparing to load and unload trains 7,500 feet long.
“This facility provides the opportunity to move freight from the West Coast into the Southeast, within a 250-mile radius of Memphis,” said Vann Cunningham, associate vice president of economic development for the company. “And it allows them to take advantage of the economies of rail.”
With the national average for diesel at $4.695 on Tuesday, shippers of all stripes are looking to convert, which bodes well for Memphis, home to five Class I railroads.
“The railroads are hurting too, but the trucking companies are hurting much worse,” said Dan Ortwerth, who follows Canadian National and BNSF for Edward Jones in St. Louis.
“Evidence is bubbling to the surface in a variety of places that the railroads are taking business from trucks,” he said.
It’s hard not to notice when trucking companies themselves are quickly becoming some of the biggest proponents of railroads, said Tom Malloy, vice president of the Intermodal Association of North America.
“One the largest growing lines of business for railroads are the trucklines,” he said.
BNSF, the No. 1 intermodal carrier among U.S. railroads, bought up land around Shelby Drive to expand its 35-acre site into its current 185-acre facility.
With its partnership with Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX, BNSF can offer West Coast shippers one-line service from the Los Angeles ports to Atlanta, even though its own track goes only to Birmingham, Ala.
“It means BNSF can attract traffic that crosses their domain but doesn’t start or end in their domain, Ortwerth said.
“The better they can smoothly coordinate with their eastern brethren, the more they are going to be a desired transportation option for shippers.”
With six 8,000-foot lanes here for moving containers from rail to truck and vice versa, BNSF will be able to send trains more than 11/2 miles long directly for Memphis.
“The push is to build longer trains,” said Scott Jenkins, BNSF’s intermodal manager in Memphis. “That means you can add 90 more containers with the same number of people.”
The five wide-span cranes going up at Shelby Drive and Lamar make it possible for BNSF to lift 1 million containers a year because they have enough reach to extend over six lines of railroad track and three lines of truck traffic.
“The cranes position us to be able to take the growth as it comes,” Jenkins said.
BNSF’s investment more than doubles the local intermodal lift capacity, good news for BNSF but even better for the city, which builds much of its case for company.
BNSF railyard
On 185 acres at Shelby Drive and Lamar
BNSF purchased 46 separate parcels of land and removed 44 separate structures, including a 12-story grain elevator.
To date, about 2 million cubic yards of soil — 130,000 truckloads — have been excavated from the site.
It will take 300,000 tons of asphalt to pave the facility. 50,000 cubic yards of concrete will be used in construction.
More than 100,000 linear feet of track will be installed.