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Port agrees with Rail Logistics
The Quincy Port District has signed an intermodal agreement with a Kansas City-based logistics company.
The lease was approved by port commissioners at last week’s meeting and signed Jan. 27.
The Quincy port will perform a variety of intermodal services, including loading, unloading and moving containers; reefer connections and monitoring; container storage; washout and cleaning services; shuttlewagon services; forklift services; pre-trip inspection of containers; and other services that may be required.
Rail Logistics LC of Kansas City has announced a new rail service called Cold Train, which will load 53-foot refrigerated containers with apples, potatoes, onions and other Washington produce at the Quincy intermodal yard and deliver them to warehouses within 200 miles of Chicago in three days.
The services promises to make agricultural products from Central Washington more competitive in upper Midwest markets, according to a report on the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Web site.
“This (agreement) has been long awaited,” port commissioner Curt Morris said at last week’s meeting. “We’re ready to go. We just have to wait for the scheduling.”
According to the Rail Logistics Web site, the service will begin April 1. The term of the agreement is from Aug. 31, 2009 to Aug. 31, 2014.
Mike Bagnaud, the vice president of marketing and sales for Rail Logistics, attended the port district’s economic summit in December and talked about how much his company has enjoyed working with the port district on this project.
“Quincy can be a hub of storage and warehousing,” he said. “We think the future for growth is right here, based on what is happening and what’s currently in this area. I think we’ve just scratched the surface of the shipping potential in this area.”
Cold Train will carry produce from the irrigated farming areas of the state immediately east of the Cascade Mountains. Grant and Yakima counties, at the center of the irrigated region, grew produce that sold for $2.4 billion in 2007, according to the Washington Agricultural Statistics Service.
If the service proves viable, it could give growers an edge against competitors, and could also create a more fuel-efficient way of moving fruit than trucks, according to the Business Journal report.
The route will be competitive with trucks in terms of speed and cost, Chris Mnichowski, Rail Logistics chief financial officer and chief operating officer, told the Business Journal.
“We wanted to go into a market that we thought was under-served, where we could compete head to head with trucks,” he said.
Growers in the center of Washington have encountered difficulty getting access to trains in recent years, in part because trucking has been cheaper and rail lines such as Burlington Northern Santa Fe have increasingly focused on long-distance traffic from the ports and have been little inclined to stop in the middle of the state, according to the report.
Rail Logistics is an asset based third-party logistics organization specializing in offering turn-key rail services to industries throughout North America.
“We have a unique opportunity to be in central Washington, where a tremendous amount of product ships from every year,” Bagnaud said at the summit. “There’s a lot of products in Washington that need to go to the American families. We want to develop and grow this business, but it all starts here.”
