NORFOLK, Va. — CSX Corp.’s growth could be the port of Hampton Roads’ gain in what’s already been a good year, the Virginian-Pilot reported.
CSX recently announced it would expand and improve its intermodal railroad services from the Portsmouth Marine Terminal, said Greg J. Edwards, a port authority managing director of marketing. Better intermodal service, which involves the movement of cargo containers from ocean liners to rail cars and trucks, helps the port sell itself to more shippers, Edwards explained Tuesday at the authority’s bimonthly board of commissioners’ meeting.
The improved CSX service will give the Virginia port more ammunition in its battle for business with the Port of New York/New Jersey, the East Coast’s largest shipping hub. The New York-area terminals handle more total cargo than the Hampton Roads port. But about 13 percent of New York’s containers move from that port on intermodal rail service — as opposed to trucks — while about 21 percent of all ocean cargo coming into Hampton Roads lands on rail cars to reach destinations in the Midwest and elsewhere, Edwards said.
The number of intermodal containers the port handled rose 13 percent in the first eight months of the year from the same period in 2001.
CSX’s new initiatives could put some pressure on the local operations of Norfolk Southern Corp., which dominates the region’s rail service. More competition between the two railroads would lead to lower local rail prices, boosting the port’s attraction to intermodal shippers — particularly companies that move large goods long distances, Edwards said.
“In an ideal situation, I’d like to see the two compete,” he said. “That’s good for the customer base.”
In August, the port’s three marine terminals, in Norfolk, Newport News and Portsmouth, handled 124,468 TEUs — 20-foot equivalency units, the international standard for measuring containers that range in length from 20 to 53 feet. That’s a drop of less than 1 percent from the all-time single-month record set in July.
For the year, container traffic is up 3.5 percent from the same time last year, and breakbulk cargo — goods such as cocoa beans and automobiles that don’t move in containers — has jumped 24 percent.
“We certainly have not seen this growth in the last couple of years, so we’re happy about that,” said Russell J. Held, a managing director of marketing for the port authority.
With $131 million in bond funds in hand, the port authority has launched the first phase of its renovation of Norfolk International Terminals South, starting this month with construction of 4,230 feet of wharf to support eight new container cranes. The wharf work will involve dredging the berth depth to 45 feet to accommodate the heaviest container ships.
The port authority plans to issue another $100 million in bonds in the next two years to pay for two more phases of the renovation. It began taking bids Tuesday for $2.2 million in work to demolish three NIT South warehouses as part of the second phase. The warehouses date to World War II and once housed cargo such as cocoa beans and rubber, commodities that have dwindled in volume in recent years and are now consolidated in the terminal’s other warehouses, said Jeffrey A. Florin, the authority’s chief engineer and director of port development.
Four new cranes, now being built by Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. Ltd. in China, are scheduled to arrive in August 2003, with four more coming a year later. Port officials call them “Suez-class” cranes to indicate that they can unload containers from ships so large that they cannot travel via the Panama Canal but must pass through the wider Suez Canal in Egypt.