(The following story by Adolfo Pesquera appeared on the San Antonio Express-News website on November 29.)
SAN ANTONIO — Stitched in parallel lines and loops, 20 miles of new railroad track rests on a massive concrete plain in southwestern Bexar County — all of it just beyond the sight of Interstate 35 South travelers. When the rail yard opens Dec. 15, it will divert truck traffic that has for years trekked through old inner-city neighborhoods to pick up containers from the East Side and South Side terminals of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Make way for the San Antonio Intermodal Terminal.
Fifteen months of construction followed its retirement from corn farming. Now the $120 million terminal stands ready to host the annual flow of 75,000 tractor-trailer trucks that up to the present rumble off city freeways toward Quintana Road on the South Side and Sherman Street on the East. It stands ready to capture unknown thousands of San Antonio-bound truck containers that in recent years were diverted to rail yards in Houston or Dallas, or held back in Laredo, then brought to San Antonio by truck because the local rail yards did not have enough capacity.
It stands ready to attract distribution centers, truck lines, factories and shipping brokers to the hundreds of acres Union Pacific bought adjacent to its shiny new terminal.
There were cost overruns. There was a lake to move. There were disagreements with a neighboring school district to hammer out. But the 300-acre, state-of-the-art terminal got done with a minimum of controversy and without attracting much attention.
Passers-by on I-35 South were more likely to notice the new North Park Toyota-Scion of San Antonio dealership that opened in October on the Laredo-bound side of the I-35/I-410 intersection. But several seconds of highway time beyond the neat rows of cars, there rises an imposing new concrete bridge over railroad tracks.
Dallas-based Eric Anderson is superintendent of intermodal operations for Union Pacific’s South Region. He oversees 14 intermodal terminals from Kansas City to New Orleans to El Paso. That will be cut by one when San Antonio retires two intermodal sites for the new rail yard.
“We stop accepting ingate (truck arrivals) Dec. 12 at the East yard,” Anderson said. “We’ll allow trucks to go out of the East yard until Dec. 19. This location is way better than the other two.”
The South yard will stop handling intermodal traffic the same week as the East yard.
For decades, tractor-trailers queued up on city streets by the old rail yards, waiting for inspectors who were on foot, using handheld computers to register each truck and to clear it for entry. Getting into the East yard typically took five minutes per truck, Anderson said.
The new yard has no inspectors on foot. Trucks approach three fully automated lanes. Drivers register their fingerprints for instant access. Portals with security cameras record the status of their containers. Average clearance time will be 90 seconds.
Better efficiency at the gate coupled with the larger scale of the yard combine to provide a handling capacity of 180,000 container lifts per year, 2.4 times that of the old rail yards combined.
“The East yard (San Antonio’s main yard) was maxed out,” Anderson said. “The result was customers were overheading — sending cargo meant for San Antonio to Houston or elsewhere, then coming back via truck. Now we can handle all the traffic that wants to go to San Antonio at San Antonio.” The old rail yards will not close altogether. They will be used for switching cars to assemble new trains. Union Pacific estimates the new terminal will have an economic impact of $2.48 billion over 20 years. Besides the terminal-generated revenue, Union Pacific has set aside another 250 acres of the 1,500 acres total it acquired for industrial development.
“Businesses like to build warehouses close to a terminal so they can have access to containers quickly,” said Meynardo Montemayor, manager of intermodal operations at the new terminal. “This land would be suitable for distribution centers, truck lines, perhaps even a foreign trade zone.”
Tina McCelvey, the real estate agent who brokered the land deal for the North Park Toyota-Scion dealership, said interest in the area took off in the spring: “Once they put that big pile of dirt at the front.”
The pile of dirt meant for the bridge led to calls from people wanting to build warehouses, truck stops, motels, restaurants, she said. Landowners began putting up larger tracts for sale. McCelvey decided to do some research and went to the Union Pacific intermodal terminal in Wilmer that opened in 2005 to service the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“There are thousands of square feet of warehouses (around the Wilmer terminal),” McCelvey said.
Between the auto dealership and the rail yard is Freeport Business Centre, an industrial park that has seen modest development. McCelvey predicted it will attract much more interest.
The rail yard is strategic in that the north end of the property intersects the Long Beach, Calif., to New Orleans line. The south end of the property intersects the Laredo to Chicago line. Yet, there is sufficient land for future development and natural buffers from urban encroachment. Its western boundary is the Medina River, and it borders Medio Creek to the east.
Initially, the main entrance was to have been from Old Pearsall Road. But Southwest Independent School District relies on Old Pearsall for the majority of its student transport planning.
“They told us there would be 300 trucks a day,” said Sharon Woldhagen, spokeswoman for the school district. “Our buses make 400 passes a day on Old Pearsall. That was going to be an awful lot of traffic on this two-lane road.”
Woldhagen described the talks that ensued in 2006 with Union Pacific as congenial. But as talks progressed, the school district learned that the truck traffic would be even higher than Union Pacific first estimated. By 2007, Union Pacific agreed to move its entrance.
“They’ve also been very good at working with us on the construction traffic that is out there,” Woldhagen said. “We had a very dry summer, and they’re good about watering the ground to keep the dust down.”
But school district bus drivers have had to deal with road construction. In addition to providing an I-35 access road to the main entrance, the Texas Department of Transportation is rebuilding the bridge over Old Pearsall at the tracks to accommodate four rail lanes. That task is expected to be completed June 2009, a highway department spokeswoman said.
Three Union Pacific employees and 73 subcontractors will staff the terminal. Many workers will be reassigned from the Quintana rail yard, Montemayor said.
Pacific Rail Services will man the giant MI-Jack Translift cranes that straddle the tracks for box lifting — raising containers off flatbed rail cars to waiting tractor-trailers or parking stalls. The rail yard has 1,300 parking stalls.
Gunderson Inc. will handle rail car inspections and perform air-brake testing. IMS (Integrated Marine Services) will perform repairs on containers.
Mobile Locomotive Services Inc. will do maintenance and fueling on the locomotives. Union Pacific installed six 10,000-gallon tanks to filter and to recycle water, separating out oil and fuel at a station that can service three locomotives simultaneously.
San Antonio-based general contractor Spawglass won the job of building the terminal. Spawglass project manager Ron Ohm described it as among the largest projects they ever handled, comparable to their construction of Valero Energy Corp.’s campus headquarters.
Similar in scope to a small airport, the project entailed removal of a small lake and the pouring of 420,000 square yards of concrete. Initially projected to cost $90 million, the project went over that by $30 million. Much of that was attributed to the inflation costs of building materials.
Anderson said the project proceeded well and was similar in its construction stage to the one in Dallas. Half the size of the Dallas-area terminal, San Antonio’s came to completion without major changes, he said.