Portland Waterfront Rail Ops (Yard 8, Intermodal, etc)

I was up to Portland (South Portland, actually) last night to drop my mother-in-law off at her place. I drove on the recently completed US Route 1 connection that allows you to travel directly to the Commercial St. waterfront area via the US Route 1 bridge that parallels the MEC mainline. This morning, coming back over the draw bridge into Portland, I saw at the end of the yard tank cars spotted at the propane facility. This is at the end of the track that used to be one of the old waterfront yards, just to the west of the Portland-South Portland Draw Bridge. When I lived in Maine from 2000-2003, I never saw cars spotted at this customer. Occasionally, they stored OYMA tank cars in the yard, but that was it. Is this returning customer a recent development?

BWP

bwparker1 wrote:I was up to Portland (South Portland, actually) last night to drop my mother-in-law off at her place. I drove on the recently completed US Route 1 connection that allows you to travel directly to the Commercial St. waterfront area via the US Route 1 bridge that parallels the MEC mainline. This morning, coming back over the draw bridge into Portland, I saw at the end of the yard tank cars spotted at the propane facility. This is at the end of the track that used to be one of the old waterfront yards, just to the west of the Portland-South Portland Draw Bridge. When I lived in Maine from 2000-2003, I never saw cars spotted at this customer. Occasionally, they stored OYMA tank cars in the yard, but that was it. Is this returning customer a recent development?

BWP

BWP, I noted he same thing as you did last week. In my limited trips by that area in recent years never had I seen any rail activity at that facility. I posted it on the Guilford Rail Sightings list but never got so much as a peep of a response...

ARS

http://www.loopnet.com/Listing/17323764 ... rtland-ME/

http://40westcommercial.com/description.php

This looks to be it. Looks like it was for sale most of this year. Who bought it? Someone just has to take a spin by to look at the sign...

Everything you ever wanted to know about the land and then some is well described in this document:

http://www.40westcommercial.com/docs/40 ... mation.pdf

Thanks to newpylong for the nice find.

Long story short is that it is the former location of the Portland Gas Light Companies Coal Degasification plant. After several Mergers and Acquisitions, a company names Unitil owns the site. Energy USA Propane has a long-term lease on a portion of the site. Unitil has some tanks there and so does EnergyUSA. Anyone with some extra change, feel free to make an offer! There is site contamination, so the asking price is probably low, due to the requirements of remediation.

My guess is that Energy USA must have shipped in some LPG to fill the larger tanks.

For what it's worth, Unitil (formerly Northern Utilities) is the natural gas supplier in southern Maine.

This might explain why there were so many LPG tanks mixed into EDPO yesterday.

They do set them off in Dover or Rock for Portsmouth, or at least they used to. But that usually wasn't more than a half dozen or so. Not sure if they even do them anymore there.

Yeah, these where mid train about half dozen or so.

Over the past year, domestic LPG has become much more price competitive vs imported product, so this may just be that company making the switch to domestic supply (i.e rail).

I'm very happy to report that the gas facility at the end of track on Commercial St. in Portland has resumed using rail !! There were FOUR lp gas tanks set at the facility today !
I did take pics and will try to post them soon.

They started getting service a couple months ago after 12 years of no service.Looks like Pan Am is going after buisness

Yeah, I was there this evening and noticed them too, though they seemed farther east than normal.

Yup, import LPG is going the way of the Wooly Mammoth, so hopefully we'll see more of this commodity moving by rail. One thing is for sure, there have been a lot more LPG cars lately on trains coming in and out of Rigby. Same goes for centerbeams of lumber. There's been the gypsum wallboard loads for some time now, but it seems like every POED lately has 5-10 lumber loads in the consist. No doubt much of this is Irving business from somewhere up North.

What exactly are we talking about?


This: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Commercia ... e&t=h&z=17

Or this: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Commercia ... e&t=h&z=18

The bottom one is the gas terminal. The top one is Sprague (formerly Merrills), which handles some paper & pulp, coal and scrap metal. Sprague across the river in S. Portland handles Oil and the Kaolin slurry you see getting railed out.