(The following story by Kathy Adams appeared on The Virginian-Pilot website on February 28, 2009.)
NORFOLK, Va. — A new rail yard at Norfolk International Terminals will double the number of cargo containers the marine terminal can move on and off rail cars each year.
Scheduled to open next month, the new Central Rail Yard features six lines of fresh track and a contingent of new equipment. It also is complemented by a new road dedicated to the terminal’s shuttle carriers, which carry cargo boxes among ships, storage and train cars.
At a cost of $33.7 million – $17 million for the rail yard, $8.5 million for new equipment and $8.2 million for the shuttle carrier road – the project will bring the number of boxes NIT’s rail operation can handle to 1 million annually, said Joe Harris, a spokesman for the Virginia Port Authority.
The portion opening next month is Phase I of a plan to replace NIT’s 20-year-old rail yard, which has four lines of track and is less efficient, Harris said.
The old operation requires three pieces of equipment to load and unload trains, Harris said. The new operation requires only two, a top picker to pluck boxes from train cars and add new ones, and a shuttle carrier to carry the boxes around the terminal.
The new operation also might allow the Port Authority to reduce the number of longshoremen needed to work at the rail yard during the second shift, said Jeff Florin, the authority’s deputy executive director of operations and chief operating officer.
That will depend on how rail volumes perform, Harris said. There’s no way to know what the labor impact will be until the yard is fully operational, he added.
Though there’s not enough demand to bring a million containers through the rail yard yet, the Port Authority expects cargo traffic to double by 2020. Rail projects, like Norfolk Southern Corp.’s Heartland Corridor and the Panama Canal expansion will contribute to growth over the next few years.
The second phase of the rail yard project will dig up the old site and replace it with a new one, bringing NIT’s capacity to 1.5 million containers. That phase is scheduled for completion in 2010, depending on when the state’s Department of Rail and Public Transportation provides the funding, Florin said.