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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
