New Rail Line Operational at Port of Oakland

Oakland, CA - The Port of Oakland welcomed the first train Thursday morning to its new $100 million near-dock rail yard at Oakland's former Army Base, a port spokesman said.

The train arrived this morning at 8 a.m. at the Port's Outer Harbor Intermodal Terminal, where different modes of transportation come together to transport goods, spokesman Robert Bernardo said.

The new yard is part of a phased rail expansion. The yard consists of five manifest tracks and eight support tracks.

The manifest tracks receive trains from high revenue-producing railroad companies and support tracks are
used for storage.

The new tracks are part of the port's strategy to improve its intermodal capabilities, according to port officials.

Currently, 80 percent of the 2.3 million containers that leave the port annually for other parts of the country go by truck and 20 percent go via intermodal means.

The port is also trying to attract more cargo that might be shipped through other ports in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The products that recently arrived were originally bound for a Canadian port, Bernardo said.

The train consisted of 100 cars and was carrying animal feed from the Midwest that was produced by agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Port tenant Capital River Group will transfer the cargo into containers for export to Asia.

Port officials are seeing a growing market for agricultural products, especially from the Midwest and the Salinas area and Central Valley in California.

The new yard consists of 39,000 linear feet of track and port officials envision warehouses and distribution centers as part of the yard.

Another part of the Army Base, which is owned by the city rather than the port, was going to be used to handle and store coal until the City Council voted down the proposal last month.

Bernardo said it's too early to tell whether the revenue earned through the new rail yard will make up for the loss of revenue from the nixed coal proposal.

But he said the yard is expected to generate 4,000 direct jobs and 12,000 indirect jobs in the area when phase two of the project is complete.

The yard was built with state and federal grants, port officials said.

--Bay City News; Image via Wikimedia Commons, By Ingrid Taylar, Flickr: Port of Oakland, CC BY 2.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0