News Coverage:
Development officials eye intermodal facility
DOUG LeDUC - dougl@fwbusiness.com
Thursday, 01 April 2010 22:00
Area economic development officials hope a statewide effort to expand logistics and advanced manufacturing in Indiana will help grow those industries in the greater Fort Wayne region, partly through the establishment of a new intermodal facility.
A strategic plan to move the industries forward in the state was released March 30 by Conexus Indiana, an Indianapolis-based group founded nearly three years ago to accomplish that mission. Read the report here.
Conexus was founded with a $3-million Lilly Endowment grant by the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, which had helped launch a similar statewide initiative for life sciences, BioCrossroads, five years earlier.
The new strategic plan and opportunity to work with Conexus is important to northeast Indiana partly because "we have great geographic locations," said John Sampson, president and chief executive officer of Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership.
"With the markets we access - Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis and other places - there's tremendous logistic opportunities in our region. Manufacturers are always looking for better ways to move products."
With its population, industrial base and transportation infrastructure, northeast Indiana is a good location to establish an intermodal operation that would not interfere with similar facilities in other parts of the state, he said.
Development of two or three large intermodal facilities for Indiana is an important step toward accomplishing infrastructure goals the Conexus plan outlined, which included reducing freight movement bottlenecks.
Andi Udris, president of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Economic Development Alliance, said the organization has been talking with Conexus because "we felt like we needed to have an intermodal operation." The facility would combine rail freight and trucking, almost like an inland port, he said. Metal containers large enough for two of them to fit on a rail car would be shipped by rail for the longest leg of an overland trip, and hauled the rest of the distance by trucks.
The containers would be transferred between trucks and rail cars by cranes or other equipment at the intermodal facility. If the containers eventually reach ports they could be transferred to ships.
"We've been looking at sites where we can house this kind of rail-truck transfer point," Udris said. "There are locations. The question is, which one would be the best, which one is the cheapest, which one gives us the most flexibility?"
Shipping by rail is less expensive than trucking over long distances, and if the rail portion of the trip exceeds 500 miles, it can be clearly advantageous to combine the two transportation modes, he said.
The alliance has been looking into the possibility of an intermodal facility, which could help exporters within 120 miles of Fort Wayne get their freight to ports on either coast, Udris said. The facility could benefit businesses ranging from manufacturers to grain elevators.
The more use such a facility would see from rail and trucking companies, the more interest such a project would stand to attract from a private developer of intermodal facilities, he said.
For that reason, "what we're trying to determine is how many users there would be," Udris said.
At Conexus, "we want to help Fort Wayne land one of the three intermodal sites," said David Holt, vice president. "The hope is it won't take that long and could happen in a couple of months. It would be huge to get one."
Intermodal facilities refer to container transfers between trains and trucks as "lifts," and Holt estimates a facility of that type in Fort Wayne could see between 50,000 and 100,000 lifts annually.
That compares with a projection of 150,000 to 200,000 for CSX's Avon yard in the Indianapolis area, he said.
"If you had a low amount of volume, it wouldn't be cost efficient," Holt said. "The lowest volume threshold probably would be 20,000 or less, and I think you're above the threshold by quite a bit."
Other logistics infrastructure improvements he said would benefit the area include work on locks on the Ohio River and Great Lakes, development of a plan to attract air freight from Chicago and converting U.S. 30 into a limited-access highway without a lot of stoplights or stop signs between Fort Wayne and Valparaiso.
The Conexus strategic plan noted Fort Wayne International Airport is among four airports in the state with air cargo facilities and among three in Indiana with 11,900 feet or more of runway.
Conexus also wants to improve high-tech logistics work-force skills in the state and work with trade associations to support public policies that would make Indiana more attractive for trucking, rail and air transportation, Holt said.
Indiana has a good opportunity to develop its logistics business, he said, because it leads the nation in interstate access and interstate miles, ranks ninth in rail miles and comes in 15th with waterborne shipping.
The strategic plan Conexus developed resulted from a two-year study, which involved brainstorming with top executives at all steps in Indiana's supply chain, and "if we do these things," Holt said, "I believe we would blow the competition away." |