(The following article by Michael Rose was posted on the Statesman Journal website on February 26.)
SALEM, Ore. — Oregon’s greenhouse and nursery industry wants to hop a freight train headed east.
Faced with a shortage of trucks during its peak shipping season, the state’s greenhouse and nursery operators are investigating trains as a transportation alternative. The Oregon Association of Nurserymen, the trade group that represents the state’s largest agricultural business, hopes to load nursery stock in boxcars and make at least one test run by June.
Refrigerated trucks have the big advantage of getting delicate plants delivered in good condition on tight time schedules. But if the pilot project succeeds in developing new ways to pack plants, a boxcar could carry three times as much plant material as a 48-foot truck trailer. Preliminary cost comparisons show it could mean a savings of $1,300 for each load.
“What trucks do is provide ultimate flexibility,” said John Coulter, who leads the transportation committee for Oregon Association of Nurserymen. “If there were all the trucks we needed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Coulter is also sales and marketing manger for Fisher Farms, a Gaston-based plant nursery. His company is eager to take part in a pilot project to see if using trains makes sense.
Oregon’s nursery industry loads an estimated 30,000 refrigerated trucks with plants at the height of the shipping season, which runs from March to June. New federal rules for truck drivers, which took effect this year and are intended to provide drivers with longer rest periods, have some worried that a truck shortage may become more acute.
The nursery industry has used trains to ship products before, but the last time any significant amount of plants left the state by rail was more than four decades ago.
The practice fell out of favor because trucks can deliver plants to their destination faster than trains. Plants begin to wither after seven to nine days in the dark; by rail it takes six days to reach Chicago. A truckload of plants can make the Chicago trip in half the time.
One reason trains are getting a second look by the nursery industry: Union Pacific Railroad’s success with using plastic and cardboard totes to speed the loading of onions.
The totes, which are in the testing phase, allow onions to be loaded with forklift trucks. They replace the plastic bags that workers have to load by hand.
Railroad officials have discussed adapting a similar tote for carrying nursery stock.
“We think there is an opportunity to be extremely competitive with trucks,” said John Bromley, a spokesman for Union Pacific.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway., another transcontinental railroad serving Oregon, also has considered making the Oregon nursery industry a customer. But the talk of transporting plants hasn’t moved beyond initial discussions, said company spokesman Gus Melonas.
At Alpha Nursery Inc. in Salem, manager RJ Trancredi said rail transportation might work for nurseries that send large orders to wholesalers. The logistics of sending a trainload of plants to a central distribution point in the Midwest, and then getting orders delivered to their final destinations makes it problematic for smaller nurseries that supply many customers, he said.
“How are at they going to coordinate all that,” Trancredi said. Alpha Nursery plans to stick with trucks.
Several obstacles must be overcome before any nursery plants take the train, said the Port of Portland’s Anne-Marie Lundberg. The port has a facility where plants could be loaded on boxcars and sent to their destination in one day.
What’s lacking is the know-how to efficiently stack nursery plants into boxcars. The totes alone won’t do the job and the port is “brainstorming” with railroad officials about using a combination of totes, bins, and racks, Lundberg said.