CSX plans $93-million expansion
More than 600 construction jobs expected for two years of Valleyfield shipment centre project
U.S. rail-freight operator CSX Corp. unveiled a $93.3-million project Friday to build a trans-shipment centre in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, to which Quebec and the municipality are contributing $21.6 million.
The total investment of $107.3 million includes a $14-million expansion of its site in Massena, N.Y.
The project is expected to create more than 600 construction jobs for the two years it will take to build the 36-hectare intermodal terminal starting this spring. The terminal will off-load containers from freight trains onto trucks and vice versa.
But while the Quebec Transport Department advertised the creation of 337 permanent jobs once the container station is open in 2015, CSX chairman, president and CEO Michael Ward told The Gazette later that the company will hire between 40 and 50 people in all.
The rest are an estimate of the indirect jobs the project could create in functions like warehousing and shipping, he said.
The estimate of 337 jobs is a pro- jection by ADEC, a Quebec consulting firm. CSX currently employs 15 people in Beauharnois.
Florida-based CSX, one of the largest U.S. freight railways, operates 33,000 kilometres of tracks in 23 states east of the Mississippi as well as Ontario and Quebec.
Ward said that the Port of Montreal and Montreal-based Canadian National Railway Co. need not worry about losing business to the planned terminal.
“CN’s routes tend to be east-west while ours are primarily northsouth,” Ward said.
But that’s not the way Louis-Antoine Paquin, a CN spokesman, saw things.
“It will certainly be added competition for us in the Montreal region,” he said in an interview, “and it definitely shows (CSX’s) desire to increase their presence here. It was not a surprise to us; we’d heard about this for some time.”
Asked if and how CN intends to counter the move, Paquin replied: “Well, let’s just see how things unfold for them first.”
As for the Port of Montreal, Ward said that “we anticipate a flow (of merchandise) to go both ways.”
It could result, he said, in increased cargo traffic, including to and from the Port of Montreal.
“That two-way flow is the best way to do it — it means you don’t move any empty containers.”
Sylvie Vachon, president of the Port of Montreal, welcomed the foreign investment but added that “it would be unfortunate if it had the opposite effect from the one intended on the supply-chain logistics.”
“The CSX network is not linked to the Port of Montreal, it’s linked to the Port of New York.”
Yves Gilson, a spokesman for the Port of Montreal, said the future terminal “offers an alternative to exporters to ship cargo to Montreal via the Port of New York or other east-coast ports (and then by CSX rail), and vice versa,” bypassing Montreal.
“It could have a negative effect on our volume.”
Quebec Transport Minister Sylvain Gaudreault said that “the Port of Montreal is extremely important to us, and I tend to see this expansion more as a complement to the infrastructure project of the port.”
The Valleyfield port handles bulk shipments rather than containers, Mayor Denis Lapointe said.
The terminal would have a capacity of 100,000 containers annually, shipments previously carried by trucks, Ward said. Gaudreault said that would help ease congestion on Montreal roads and would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 120,000 tonnes a year.
Railroads are three to four times more fuel-efficient, Ward said.
The opening last month of the Highway 30 extension, linking Valleyfield with Montreal’s South Shore, “was extremely important; a perfect, critical element for us,” Ward said, “because it gave us direct access to Montreal by truck. That was the key.”
Despite intense competition between railways and the trucking industry, the two are also partners by necessity.
Railways link distant cities while trucks take goods to their final destination or from factories and warehouses to train terminals like the one planned for Valleyfield.
Gaudreault said 43 per cent of greenhouse gases in Quebec are derived from the transportation industry. The province aims to cut 25 per cent of those emissions by 2020.
Ward said that the $71-million investment in Valleyfield, as well as $14 million in Massena, N.Y., is the company’s biggest investment in recent years, excluding a $175-million expansion last year at its main terminal in the Ohio Valley.