Utility chips in to market bare produce warehouse
Union Pacific blamed COVID-19 when it shut down the facility
The idea proved popular at first.
A Long Island-based produce distributor would bring dedicated freight trains laden with everything from vegetables and citrus to wines and cider two or three times a week from the West Coast to the Capital Region, where it would be distributed by truck to retailers up and down the East Coast.
It worked like this: CSX and Union Pacific would share the trains’ operation, in the process taking thousands of trucks
off the road and consuming much less energy to move the produce and other perishables across the country.
Refrigerated box cars were monitored by satellite, and more than 160 employees would be waiting to unload shipments at the $18 million warehouse and distribution center at the Rotterdam Industrial Park.
Union Pacific in 2017 ended up acquiring what was called Railex and folding it into its own Cold Connect operation. But less than three years later, it ending up shutting down the operation, leaving 162 workers out of a job and a state-of-theart refrigerated warehouse with good rail and highway connections empty.
Union Pacific blamed COVID -19 for the shutdown. With restaurants and schools closed, demand for its perishables fell. But fuel prices also dropped and trucks were once again competitive. Meanwhile Union Pacific was exploiting scale economies, cutting jobs and running fewer, longer freight trains. In an era of two-mile-long freights, the dinky 55-car produce trains that required priority handling to move across the country in five days or less apparently no longer delivered the necessary profitability.
And there never seemed to be enough cargo to ship back to the West Coast from the Capital Region.
The trains were often empty on their return trips. And now so is the Rotterdam warehouse.
National Grid, which lost a major utility customer when Cold Connect pulled the plug last spring, is providing a $10,000 grant to market the facility in what is now called the Rotterdam Corporate Park. The Schenectady County Metroplex Development Authority will provide another $5,000.
The Union Pacific facility will be the focus of the effort that will also seek to attract other businesses to the park, owned by the Schenectady-based Galesi Group.
“It’s always our pleasure to work with Metroplex in Schenectady as well as the Galesi Group,” said National Grid Regional Executive Laurie Poltynski.
“This project to promote growth at the Rotterdam Corporate Park is a great opportunity to strengthen those relationships while keeping the economy going during these challenging times.”
“National Grid has always been a strong supporter of our economic development efforts in Schenectady County,” said Metroplex Chair Ray Gillen. “This cooperative business recruitment grant will help us build on recent successes at the Rotterdam Corporate Park while helping to identify tenants for the vacant UP building.”
The Union Pacific building is being marketed by Peter Struzzi, executive managing broker at Pyramid Brokerage, a Cushman & Wakefield company.
The 228,000-square-foot building, with 100,000 square feet of cold storage, is large enough to drive a train through, which is how the Railex trains were unloaded. The building also has 41 truck loading doors.
The Galesi Group earlier this year completed a 250,000square-foot building that is occupied by Fedex and Home Depot. Another 200,000-squarefoot building is under construction.
In all, the Rotterdam Corporate Park includes nearly 4 million square feet of space.