Port of Quincy Requests Terminal Expansion Funding

By Mark Edward Nero

The Port of Quincy this week requested $16.2 million in transportation funding from the Washington State Legislature to expand the infrastructure at its intermodal terminal to help restore “critical domestic eastbound intermodal rail service” for Central Washington fresh produce, perishable and frozen foods shippers.

The port says the project would expand the infrastructure at the intermodal terminal to meet unit train requirements of BNSF Railway and help eliminate congestion on the Great Northern Corridor Rail Line in Quincy, Wash. In particular, the port says, the expansion project would include installation of three additional intermodal tracks to increase the capacity of the terminal to be able to simultaneously load or unload longer intermodal container trains, and a new longer siding track and set out/pick up track that would allow longer trains to pull off of the BNSF mainline at Quincy for arrival and departure in one piece.

The project would also entail expanding the surface area of the intermodal terminal to allow for more storage of containers, and constructing a bridge across the US Bureau of Reclamation West Canal near Quincy.

Expanding the terminal’s infrastructure would then allow the port to bring-in an intermodal operator to begin shipping fresh produce, frozen foods and other perishable goods grown in the state to the Midwest and Eastern US markets, the port says.

Port of Quincy Selling 200 Acres to Microsoft

By Mark Edward Nero

The Port of Quincy, Washington intends to sell about 200 acres of land to tech giant Microsoft for about $11 million, which would be one of the largest land deals in the port’s history.

The Port of Quincy announced in a statement that it would sell 60 acres it owns to Microsoft, plus resell an adjacent 142 acres owned by a private party that was recently annexed and now falls within city limits.

The pending sale, on which the port had been working for nearly a year, is expected to close in late January. Port commissioners announced it during their Dec. 23 meeting, following a public hearing to announce plans to sell the property. The sale will occur in two separate transactions.

First, Microsoft will pay $3.98 million for 60 acres the port already owns; the port is also buying 142 adjacent acres from Donald and Joyce Helsley for $6.63 million, and then selling it to Microsoft for $7.05 million, according to the purchase-and-sale agreement, which commissioners and Microsoft representatives have already signed.

The city of Quincy annexed the Helsley property into the city limits in mid-December.

The Quincy location would be the second for Microsoft, which built its first server farm on 75 acres of port property in 2007. However, the new development would be more than three times larger than the current property Microsoft owns locally.

“The impact to the area will be second-to-none,” port Commissioner Curt Morris said.

Construction on the new site is expected to begin this spring, according to the tech company, with the first phase completed by early 2015.

In most recent years, the port has attracted six server farms, which are digital warehouses that support Internet services. Along with Microsoft have come Yahoo!, Dell, Sabey, Vantage and Intuit.

The port says Quincy has been an attractive option for many of the companies partly because of low electrical costs.

Logistics Company Acquires Port of Quincy Land

Diamond Logistics Northwest (DLNW) is buying about 18 acres from the Port of Quincy, Washington, on the Columbia River, for future expansion of its cross-docking and load consolidation facilities.

The DLNW development is designed to be built in stages with Phase 1 scheduled for construction in the next 18 months. The property is located about 10 miles north of I-90, next to a new Amway-Nutrilite Botanical Concentrate Manufacturing facility scheduled to be completed in early 2014.

Currently, DLNW operates a 15,000 square foot refrigerated warehouse just north of Quincy; however, the newly acquired property in Industrial Park No. 6 in the port is expected to allow for additional cold storage space and more room for loading and unloading trucks.

“It is clear to us that changes in trucking regulations are creating challenges for everyone involved in the perishable supply chain, which is why DLNW is providing a cross-docking and load consolidation facility to help produce shippers and receivers,” DLNW President Warren Morgan said.

DLNW says it has also been working with intermodal service company Cold Train to enhance the service customers receive when they take advantage of the refrigerated and expedited intermodal transportation options available in Quincy.

According to Cold Train President Steve Lawson, his company has been involved in a pilot program with Diamond Logistics NW for the past six months.

“Many of our customers have been requesting cross dock and consolidation services, and Diamond Logistics NW has provided that service seamlessly,” he said. “We look forward to their full scale operation being completed in the future.”

Amway Buys Port of Quincy Acreage

Direct selling company Amway has bought 12 acres of a newly-developed industrial park at the Port of Quincy, Washington on which the company says it plans to build a 48,000-square-foot nutritional products extraction and concentration facility.

Amway also has an option with the port to buy another 15 acres of property at the same industrial park. Amway says it plans to begin development of a $31.8 million facility at the port later this year, which would create about 30 permanent jobs and about 100 temporary construction jobs.

Operations are expected to begin in 2014, according to Michigan-based Amway.

Amway’s locating a processing facility at the port is the culmination of several months of efforts by a coalition of partners, according to Port of Quincy chair and president Curt Morris, including the Washington State Department of Commerce, Grant County Public Utility District, Grant County Economic Development Council, the City of Quincy and other local entities.

The Amway deal follows several other major additions the Port of Quincy has made in the past few years, the largest of which came in early 2010, when the port upgraded its freight transportation connections and began a partnership with Cold Train, via BNSF Railway, to provide door-to-door refrigerated intermodal service between the Pacific Northwest and Chicago/Indianapolis/Ohio Valley area markets.

The Cold Train intermodal container rail and distribution service has turned the Quincy Intermodal Terminal into a key distribution hub for central and eastern Washington.

Seattle Port Officials Visit Inland Quincy Port, Eye Cooperation

Several Port of Seattle port commissioners and executives visited the Washington State Port of Quincy Intermodal Terminal last week, with an eye toward the viability of utilizing Quincy as an inland port to facilitate intermodal shipments by rail from central Washington to the Port of Seattle.

The Seattle port officials also met with Quincy port commissioners during the visit to hear about the recent economic and transportation developments that have occurred at the Port of Quincy, including high-tech data center expansions by Microsoft and Yahoo and new major data center development projects by Dell and Sabey.

In addition, Quincy staff provided the Seattle officials with a tour of the Port of Quincy Intermodal Terminal and the Pacific Northwest-Chicagoland Express "Cold Train" Intermodal Service.

The "Cold Train" service is a refrigerated intermodal container rail and distribution service running between Quincy, in central Washington state and Chicago, Illinois. Since starting a little over a year ago, the service has rapidly grown in popularity with produce shippers in the Pacific Northwest, according to Quincy officials, as well as with shippers in the Midwest.

The "Cold Train" service departs the Port of Quincy five days a week loaded with fresh or frozen produce destined for the Midwest. The produce, grown and packed by local growers/packers in Washington state, is loaded into "Cold Train" 53-foot refrigerated containers and brought to the Port of Quincy Intermodal Terminal. At the terminal, the containers are double-stacked onto an expedited nonstop train to Chicago.

According to a Port of Quincy release, Seattle officials on the trip – which included port CEO Tay Yoshitani and port commission president Bill Bryant – expressed interest in how the "Cold Train" service could work with the Port of Quincy as an inland port to facilitate intermodal shipments by rail from central Washington to the Port of Seattle.

In addition, Quincy officials report that there was discussion about how the "Cold Train's" success of shipping both inbound and outbound cargo has effectively turned the Port of Quincy Intermodal Terminal into a key distribution hub for the central Washington area.