Port board digs into what park can produce

Oct 16, 2023

HERSHEY — Leaders of Lincoln County's budding industrial rail park got down Monday to the key question: What do we do with this?

Board members of the brand-new Nebraska International Port of the Plains "inland port authority" used their second monthly meeting to explore that question with two visiting experts.

Chairman Vince Dugan peppered them with questions about what goods and industries the rail park can attract, how loading, unloading and customs operations might work and how to design the park to accommodate it all.

"Some of the things that we've been talking about (are) what's going to be our sweet spot," said the Trego-Dugan Aviation Inc. president. "What do we have available here that is going to be something that's marketable?"

Todd Hackel, Union Pacific Railroad's regional manager of industrial development, and Paul Hentschke, senior vice president of Tran Systems of Fort Worth, Texas, agreed that agricultural foodstuff s and biofuels are the most promising outbound products.

Mixed "local manifest" U.P. trains are most likely to bring goods in and out from the rail park that move between Lincoln County and other national and international locations, they added.

Plans for designing the rail park should be "loose enough to where when you do get that anchor industry to come in, you can adjust it as we need to go," Hentschke said in a conference room at the former Greenbrier Rail Services building, now rail-park headquarters.

Tran Systems did the initial rail park "conceptual study" for the North Platte Area Chamber & Development Corp., which spearheaded the rail park's founding starting in 2020.

Lincoln County commissioners agreed last year to found the Port of the Plains, designated by the state in February as one of Nebraska's first two inland port authorities. Its board held its organizational meeting July 31.

Hentschke and Hackel helped board members distinguish between "intermodal" shipping — which moves preloaded, sealed containers among trucks, trains and ships — and "transmodal" shipping that involves "transloading" products between trains and trucks into different containers.

Oceangoing shipping lines typically own and control the intermodal containers people see stacked up on flatcars, the visitors said.

Intermodal terminals handle "a very specialized service product," Hackel said. The nearest of U.P.'s 24 such terminals are in Denver and Council Bluffs, Iowa, though he said the latter is much smaller than Denver's.

Given those realities, the Hershey rail park likely would be most attractive for transloading products "from truck to rail or from rail to truck" or storing products in warehouses, Hentschke said.

But having an "intermodal hub (for) the containers that are coming in and being stacked, you know, five or six high … that's really not this location."

Both said Port of the Plains perhaps could facilitate "stuffing" of intermodal containers — if they can be leased — at the Hershey rail park for export abroad.

North Platte's proximity to Denver could help, Hackel said. "If they're able to get containers from Denver, they could bring them on a chassis, bring them to this area, stuff the container, dray it back … and then move by train from there."

"We have several (people) in the area who are very interested" in loading intermodal containers from the rail park, said board member Kirk Olson.

"We've talked a lot about the stuffing operation. I think that's a viable option here," Hentschke said. But "if that's something that the group wants to proceed forward with, you know, there's a lot more due diligence to do."

Hackel cautioned the board not to get too caught up on intermodal containers. "The bulk of agricultural products we move on Union Pacific today is moving in carloads."

He and Hentschke said Union Pacific likely would pick up or deliver cars at the rail park as a "drop-and-pull" operation rather than have engines enter the rail park to serve customers.

A third-party short-line railroad likely would be needed to build and break up trains within the park, Hentschke said.

"I keep falling back to the ag side" in identifying products that would be Port of the Plains' niche for handling at the Hershey rail park, he added.

The North Platte chamber last September said it's looking to recruit a soybean oil "crush" processing plant as the rail park's anchor industry, shipping its product to renewable diesel fuel producers.

Refrigerated foods produced locally and held at the rail park for shipment also could be attractive, Hackel said. Outbound beef from the Sustainable Beef LLC plant has been mentioned as a possibility by North Plattearea leaders.

"That could be a pretty good fit for the railroad," Hackel said. U.P. trains haul potatoes, onions and other foods from the Pacific Northwest and Idaho, "and they go back with Midwest protein."

Possible incoming products at the rail park could include raw foods for processing, steel coils for producing pipe, rock for road construction, road salt, magnesium chloride and lumber, Hackel and Hentschke said.

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