(The following story by Jennifer Frazer appeared on the Wyoming News website on may 31.)
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Railroad turnout manufacturer VAE Nortrak announced plans Wednesday to begin manufacturing concrete switch ties in Cheyenne, sinking millions into the local economy and adding dozens of new jobs.
The company will invest $4.7 million in its Cheyenne facility and fill two buildings it recently bought from the city of Cheyenne with up to 60 new employees.
The assembly lines at VAE Nortrak have been churning out railroad turnouts – rail sections that split or unite tracks, also commonly, but inaccurately, called switches – for 10 years now.
Since June 4, 1997, when the Cheyenne plant opened, the facility has expanded from simply assembling turnouts from prefabricated parts to manufacturing them from raw components like wooden ties and steel rails.
Concrete switch ties – one part of a turnout – last longer and are more stable than their wooden counterparts and don’t come with the environmental problems associated with disposing of creosote-soaked ties. Nortrak will become the only manufacturer of turnouts in the United States to produce concrete switch ties.
To accommodate its new manufacturing line, the company has bought two buildings from the city of Cheyenne at 1801 and 1803 Pacific Ave., directly adjacent to the present facility.
The company will take possession of the buildings on June 4, just a week after the purchase, which G.S. Weatherly, vice president of sales, who works at the Cheyenne facility, credits to the efforts of Cheyenne LEADS and the Cheyenne City Council. Those two groups have been extremely helpful, Weatherly said.
“It makes people want to do business here,” he said.
The additions will more than double VAE Nortrak’s square footage, from about 65,000 square feet to 158,000 square feet. The company plans to start operations in its new facility in October and have it running at full capacity in a year.
The move also represents a significant investment in the Cheyenne community, Garneau said.
“We’ve been here for 10 years, and we will stay here for a very, very long time,” he said.
When the facility opened in 1997, it was the third plant for the company, which is headquartered in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada.
“Our vision was to become the largest supplier of track work, and we knew we needed a new factory,” said Sylvain Garneau, CEO of VAE Nortrak North America.
The company supplies track work like turnouts, curved track or custom layouts. Cheyenne’s facility produces turnouts almost exclusively.
Inside the machine shops and out in the yard, employees and automated machines grind, weld, cut and mill steel and wood into 10 finished turnouts per week that can be shipped whole or disassembled into kits.
Cheyenne is the largest of eight plants the company owns in North America, and has swelled from about 20 employees on opening day and 70 at the end of that year to about 120 today.
Cheyenne was chosen because it was one of Union Pacific’s preferred sites for the plant and because of the proximity of the Powder River Basin coal mines, which ship their product by rail.
More than 90 percent of the work Nortrak now does is for Union Pacific Railroad. The company has gone from providing only about 5 percent of Union Pacific’s specialty track work in 1997 to 75 percent today.
Demand grew so much that though Nortrak had originally planned only to be an assembly plant for prefabricated parts, it switched to manufacturing and assembling the turnouts here. As a result, the company spent more than three times as much in Cheyenne as it had originally planned.
What fueled that demand, said Brian Abbott, chief technical officer, was the massive tonnages of coal leaving the Powder River Basin. The railroads there needed a higher-tech product to handle the loads. Nortrak was able to provide it.