Published Date : 2022-08-31
Monday’s opening of a road-rail corridor that will streamline truck haulage in Prince Rupert without increasing traffic in the local community is seen as another step in an effort to attract more export and import transloading operations that the western Canadian port hopes will significantly boost its cargo volumes.
The Fairview-Ridley Connector Corridor, with a private freight roadway and rail sidings, will reduce the drayage distance from the existing transloading facilities to the port’s marine terminals from 12.4 miles to 3.4 miles while diverting the truck trips away from the community’s streets, according to Brian Friesen, vice president of trade development and communications at the Prince Rupert Port Authority (PRPA).
Daily truck traffic generated by the port has grown from a few trips 15 years ago to several hundred today.
“The road and rail corridor directly links Fairview Terminal, both current and future capacity, with future import and export logistics sites … that will offer new opportunities for Canadian businesses to reach global markets through containerized trade,” the PRPA said in a statement.
Prince Rupert has three transloading facilities where forest and agricultural products and plastic pellets are received in bulk cars on the Canadian National Railway and then transloaded into marine containers for export. Exports have increased from virtually none when the port opened in 2007 to more than 30 percent of its total laden container volume today, Friesen said.
Construction is scheduled to begin next year on a large export transloading facility to serve multiple tenants. Exports are expected to “explode” within the next few years to account for half of Prince Rupert’s total container volume, Friesen said.
Port to develop new import transloading facility
The port in the next few years also plans to develop an import transloading facility where laden import marine containers will be transloaded into 53-foot domestic containers that CN will carry to destinations in eastern Canada and the US. The empty marine containers will then be filled with export commodities at the export transload facilities.
“It will all happen behind the port fence,” Friesen said. “There will be no impact on the community.”
Through the first seven months of 2022, Prince Rupert handled 599,659 laden and empty TEU, down 2 percent from the first seven months of 2021, according to port statistics. The port handled 1.14 million TEU all of last year.
The port’s Fairview container terminal in September will be expanded to an annual throughput capacity of 1.65 million TEU from 1.35 million TEU at present.