CSX, N.Y.-N.J. port mark rail improvement
A $20 million project to raise the roof on a Civil War-era tunnel and remove other obstacles in New Jersey will improve movement of double-stack freight trains between container terminals in the Port of New York and New Jersey and the rest of the country.
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Officials from CSX, the state of New Jersey and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey joined U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez Friday to mark the opening of the Liberty Corridor Freightway that will allow trains from CSX and Norfolk Southern to move freely move double-stack railcars filled with two high-cube containers over “shared-asset” trackage in the port. In the past, high-cube boxes had to be matched with standard containers to pass through the Bergen and Waldo tunnels.
It took nearly nine months to clear the tunnels and perform other work on the right-of-way. Port officials noted they had to grind and blast through Jersey Palisades, some of the hardest rock in America, to perform the work. During the construction, trains were routed to the west so that crews could work round-the-clock on the project.
Now that the work is completed, CSX said it would be able to carry the same number of boxes on shorter trains and also reduce the cost of making up trains.
The project is a key part of CSX’s intermodal strategy, said John Koch, an assistant vice president of sales and marketing. CSX, which said it controls 66 percent to 75 percent of the intermodal traffic in the port, would now be able to send trains on a daily basis to a large new intermodal terminal it expects to complete next March in North Baltimore, Ohio, just south of Toledo.
Instead of waiting for sufficient containers to build a train to go to destinations such as Cincinnati, the port will send daily trains to North Baltimore, where cargo will be combined with cargo from other destinations, then reshipped “like a starburst” to cities throughout the Midwest.
Koch said the $175 million North Baltimore terminal would function much like a transshipment hub in the maritime industry, transferring containers between main lines and various feeders to smaller destinations. ' Chris Dupin