(The following story by David Patch appeared on the Toledo Blade website on May 8.)
BOWLING GREEN, Ohio — While a planned CSX Transportation rail terminal near North Baltimore, Ohio, will employ only about 100 people, thousands more jobs will arrive when transportation-oriented businesses locate nearby, railroad representatives said yesterday during a briefing for Wood County and local officials.
And though CSX has asked Ohio and other states along its tracks to help pay for the cost of improving bridge and tunnel clearances between Ohio and several East Coast ports, the railroad representatives said the North Baltimore project will be built even if that bridge and tunnel work isn’t done.
“We are building a terminal there,” Rusty Orben, CSX’s director of public affairs for Ohio, said of the 500 acres a CSX affiliate has purchased on the north side of State Rt. 18 between North Baltimore and Hoytville, Ohio, most of it in Henry Township.
“This will benefit not just Wood County, but Lucas County, Hancock County, and all of northwest Ohio,” said Tom Blaha, executive director of the Wood County Economic Development Commission.
The rail terminal’s formal announcement comes as southern Wood County is reeling from two job-cut announcements in North Baltimore.
On April 30, auto supplier Continental Structural Plastics Inc. announced elimination of 200 of the 270 jobs at its North Baltimore plant, while Johnson Rubber’s companywide shutdown earlier in April included the closing of a North Baltimore plant that employed 125.
CSX will begin construction before the end of the year, Lisa Mancini, the railroad’s senior vice president for infrastructure initiatives, told a gathering of several dozen.
Ms. Mancini described the 100 or so positions anticipated within the North Baltimore facility as “good-paying railroad jobs.”
But the big economic impact will come from warehousing and distribution firms that likely will move nearby to take advantage of rail transportation, she said.
CSX’s estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 jobs is based on an analysis by a Massachusetts consultant, Ms. Mancini said.
Along with the county commissioners and other government officials, the audience included representatives of area transportation firms, land developers, and even construction contractors eager to capture part of the $80 million CSX expects to spend on the facility.
The North Baltimore yard, Ms. Mancini said, will allow the railroad to capture a longer portion of “intermodal shipments” – freight loaded in truck trailers or, to an increasing degree, shipping containers that ride railroad flatcars between major terminals but are trucked to and from customers’ loading docks.
Reducing the distance such freight is trucked will improve highway safety, reduce highway maintenance needs, and provide for more fuel-efficient transportation that benefits industry and shippers alike, she said.
The CSX presentation emphasized container cargo picked up from ships at three East Coast ports – Wilmington, N.C.; Portsmouth, Va., and Baltimore – that CSX believes will become increasingly important as more Asian cargo ships bypass congested West Coast ports, especially after a Panama Canal enlargement project is finished in 2015.
But Ms. Mancini said the North Baltimore terminal also will handle freight brought in from other ports, sorting the containers into new trains bound for regional destinations like Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, and Detroit, while marshalling outbound shipments from those places into trains headed either east or west.
Containers headed to or from Toledo, she said afterward, probably will be trucked since the distance between Toledo and North Baltimore is relatively short – about 35 miles. CSX does not currently load or unload intermodal shipments in Toledo.
To move containers between the mid-Atlantic ports and Ohio in the most efficient manner – “double-stack” trains in which the freight boxes are stacked two-high on railcars – CSX will need to enlarge tunnels and improve bridge clearances at dozens of points along its tracks in eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland.
For that work, the railroad is seeking government cooperation, particularly in cases where bridges carrying roads over the tracks would be replaced with new, taller structures.
In Ohio, CSX expects that aspect to cost $60 million, of which it is seeking about $30 million in state or federal funds.
But Mr. Orben said that the North Baltimore terminal will be ready to operate whether the bridge and tunnel improvements are made.
He likened it to a lamp with a dimmer switch that only reaches full brightness when the switch is turned on all the way.
“It will grow much quicker, we will get maximum benefit,” if the bridges and tunnels are improved, Mr. Orben said.