Jaguar expands footprint
Joplin, Missouri-headquartered Jaguar Transport Holdings has acquired five short line railroads from Ogden, Utah-based The Western Group, a rail transportation services company.
The Thursday announcement comes days after Jaguar said it had acquired an industrial park in Central Ohio.
Jaguar assumed operations of the following five railroads on Sunday: Cimarron Valley Railroad, which serves southwest Kansas, northern Oklahoma and eastern Colorado; Washington Eastern Railroad; Texas and Eastern Railroad, which has operations between Rusk and Palestine, Texas, along with the Texas State Railroad; Southwestern Railroad, which serves southern New Mexico; and Oregon Eastern Railroad.
Jaguar is also acquiring The Western Railroad Builders, a railroad engineering, design, construction and maintenance firm with industrial and railroad clients.
Jaguar partnered with the OPSEU Pension Plan Trust Fund to complete the acquisition. The fund invests and manages one of Canada’s largest pension funds, with experience in investing in surface transportation and logistics, Jaguar said.
“Our commercial team is industry and commodity specific, not property focused,” said Tim Enayati, Jaguar senior vice president for commercial development. This acquisition gives Jaguar’s commercial team “a deeper knowledge about specific industries and the ability to better understand our customers and provide meaningful logistics solutions.”
Just days earlier, on Oct. 30, Jaguar said that it had acquired the Marion Industrial Center in Marion, Ohio.
The logistics center in central Ohio has eight miles of rail infrastructure, 1.55 million square feet of distribution facilities, rail switching and railcar maintenance services, 3PL services, transloading operations and over 511 acres of industrial zoned land, with 200 additional acres zoned industrial ready for further development, according to Jaguar.
Jaguar will rename the rail-centric facility Marion Industrial Rail Park to enhance the focus on the rail infrastructure and opportunities to provide efficient and effective solutions to existing and new customers, Jaguar said.
The center interchanges with CSX (NASDAQ: CSX), according to Jaguar’s website.
Real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, which brokered the sale of the Marion Industrial Center on behalf of Jaguar, said Friday that the center offers third-party logistics companies and manufacturing companies a laydown yard with “unprecedented” capacity, a rail-served auto ramp with storage for thousands of automobiles, a railcar repair facility and fully built out intermodal facility. The center also has transload capacity capable of unloading and loading multiple unit trains simultaneously, Cushman & Wakefield said.
“This site is strategically located north of Columbus so that shippers can take advantage of tremendous multimodal transportation corridors,” said Michael Flynn, director of Cushman & Wakefield’s rail advisory group. “The Marion Industrial Center is capable of facilitating almost any type of rail-served freight or material movement with endless volume capacity, which is highly sought-after by rail shippers and companies looking to drive profit margin and competitive advantage by reducing their logistics costs.”
Financial terms of either transaction weren’t disclosed.
OmniTRAX readies business development sites in Illinois, Texas
Short line operator and logistics provider OmniTRAX has added sites in Illinois and Texas to its rail-ready sites program.
Denver-based OmniTRAX, an affiliate of real estate portfolio manager The Broe Group, is working with the Rockford Area Economic Development Council and the city of Peru, both in Illinois, to prepare sites adjacent to the Illinois Railway. The railway interchanges with all six Class I railroads except Kansas City Southern (NYSE: KSU).
The four rail-served sites range from 24 acres to 1,058 acres. There are also five sites available in Peru ranging in size from 60 acres to 161 acres.
Rockford and Peru are attractive locations for advanced and heavy industries, including automotive assembly and parts manufacturing, aerospace component manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, value-added agriculture and logistics/warehousing, OmniTRAX said.
The company is also working on developing three sites that have access to Brownsville & Rio Grande International Railway in Texas. The terminal switching railway interchanges with Union Pacific (NYSE: UP), BNSF (NYSE: BRK) and Kansas City Southern de Mexico (NYSE: KSU).
OmniTRAX is working with the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation to develop the sites. The sites are conducive for companies affiliated with the advanced and heavy industries, including automotive assembly and parts manufacturing, aerospace component manufacturing, metals recycling, port-related industries and large-scale manufacturing.
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