PORTLAND, Maine — After years of planning and millions of dollars in public and private investment, freight trains are now carrying shipping containers loaded on the Portland waterfront to other parts of New England.
State officials see the rail link as key to reviving the port, which was among the largest on the East Coast a century ago but had fallen in past decades.
The state of Maine spent last year clearing land west of the Casco Bay Ferry terminal in Portland. It is expanding the International Marine Terminal, which container ship company Eimskip moved into in 2013.
“This is a new piece of equipment we just acquired from Eimskip,” says John Henshaw, executive director of the Maine Port Authority, walking Irwin Gratz through the expanded terminal last fall. “It just increases our capacity to move containers through the terminal. Also will allow us to move one of our existing assets here, something called a rail packer over to our new rail siding.”
That rail packer and rail line got its first use Friday, sending bottles of Poland Spring Water on what amounted to a test run into Massachusetts.
Henshaw says the state, and Eimskip, have bigger plans for the facility. They want to make it more attractive to importers.
“So the reach we’re talking about is beyond the Maine market and even the northeastern market,” he says. “It reaches out into the country at large and the rail capacity is going to help us extend that reach as well.”
And the flow of goods will go in the other direction as well. Eimskip is based in Iceland, which Henshaw points out is an island nation that imports most of what it needs.
“We export everything from electric vehicles to household goods to tires, paint, other types of consumables,” he says. “Food product, produce, groceries, just about everything you could think an economy like theirs could consume.”
Maine has three deep-water ports and the state is currently upgrading or planning to upgrade all of them.
In Searsport, the state wants to deepen the ship channel and the area around its pier so larger ships can be accommodated. The plan has drawn opposition locally from lobstermen, among others.
The state withdrew its application for an environmental permit last year, but Henshaw says that was due to a timing issue. He says the state will re-apply for the permit later this year.
In Eastport, plans for rebuilding the breakwater there had to be accelerated after part of it collapsed in Dec. 2014. Chris Gardner, executive director of the Eastport Port Authority, says construction is now underway, due to be completed by the middle of 2017.
Gardner says Eastport is looking to export more lumber — he says it’s a necessary antidote to the decline of the paper industry in Maine.
“There is no reason for cutters to cut,” he says. “There is no reason for forests to be managed. And that’s going to be problematic. So, we really think, and that’s the investment we’ve made over the past several years, that the ability to be an export point for some of our low-grade wood fibers could be extremely important, not just for our port, but for the forest products industry in Maine in general.”
Gardner says what Eastport lacks is the kind of rail connection the International Marine Terminal now has in Portland. He estimates the nearest rail link is some 25 miles away. But Gardner says that’s an expense the state might want to seriously consider.
“Sometimes, we fail to think big enough here in the great state of Maine,” he says. “And we think that our opportunities are just what we can see five feet in front of us. We need to recognize that we could be an integral part of a change in global shipping.”
At the Portland facility, the state is planning to begin another upgrade to the terminal later this year: a cold storage building that will handle foods headed for shipment in either direction.
