New York-Toledo stack train planned
An Ohio company is planning to provide shippers moving containerized cargo through the Port of New York and New Jersey with a new option to move cargo to and from the Toledo, Ohio region.
Jacobs Industries, which offers warehousing, logistics and trucking services, is planning to begin regular double-stack service on the CSX between a private rail terminal Jacobs operates near Wallbridge, Ohio, and the marine terminals in Port Newark-Elizabeth in the next couple of months.
Initial plans are to have the CSX railroad move about 40 FEUs of cargo three times a week between the two terminals.
Jim Jacobs, president of the company, said the new service would be in addition to an existing service double-stack service CSX and Jacobs maintains between Baltimore and the Toledo-area terminal.
New York is a larger container port than Baltimore, and has seen the number of all-water services from the Far East grow rapidly in recent years.
Jacobs believes the new intermodal service will appeal to shippers moving containers to retail distribution centers and for the automotive industry. He also said the company has been speaking to several exporters who have expressed interest in the service.
“We are also interested in people who want to move onesies and twosies,” he added.
Mike Radzinski, manager of international service for CSX, said double-stack cars carrying up to 40 FEUs would be added to the eight trains CSX operates each week to Chicago. Those trains also have blocs of cars bound for Cleveland, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio.
The cars bound for the Jacobs facility would be made up in Port Newark-Elizabeth, then dropped at the CSX Stanley Yard outside Toledo. It is about 550 miles from New York to Toledo.
Jacobs operates an integrated logistic center that is located on the Ohio Turnpike (Interstate 80 and 90), about two-and-a-half miles from I-75.
Tom Blaha, executive director of the Wood County Economic Development Commission, said the area has about 12 million square feet of warehousing within 20 miles of the site, including major distribution facilities operated by companies such as Walgreens, Lowe's, Best Buy and Kohl's.
Jacobs operates its own locomotives at the site, which has about two-and-a-half miles of rail track spread over 84 acres, with another 100 acres available for additional expansion. It is part of Toledo’s Foreign Trade Zone 8.
Jacobs has 300,000 square feet of warehouse space divided among four buildings at the site and TNT Logistics also has a facility.
The offers a variety of services to intermodal services including rail-truck transloading, cross-dock services, and sequencing of parts for automobile customers such as Daimler Chrysler. It has an affiliated trucking company that maintains a 200-trailer fleet, which includes vans, flatbeds, double-drop trailers for high pieces, and pneumatic trailers for food, plastic and minerals.
In addition to intermodal cargo, Jacobs says the terminal handles a variety of other railcars carrying grain, building materials, plastic pellets and liquid cargo.
Last year the ExpressRail system at the Port of New York and New Jersey handled 338,882 containers, 11.8 percent more than the prior year, and 113 percent more than in 1999. In addition to the trains to Chicago, intermodal service is offered to Pittsburgh; Wooster, Mass.; Montreal; and Toronto.
After the addition of 5,300 feet of track to 22,000 feet of rail track last year, marine terminals will have the ability to move 600,000 containers through the port annually, Richard Larrabee, director of the port authority's port commerce department. The capacity is divided up so that about 400,000 can be handled at the Maher and APM Terminals in Port Elizabeth, and 100,000 each from the PortsAmerica terminal in Port Newark and the New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook on Staten Island, where an intermodal terminal is scheduled to come online later this year.
