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

Fink the Younger also exclaimed that Poland Spring had shipped their 10,000 container on PAR recently. The goal is to take 650 trucks that travel to NYC off the road

I also thought it was notable that he described the business as shifting from wood products and paper to, "food and fuel". He did however acknowledge the expansion underway at Sappi as being very significant.

Where in Lincoln would this happen if it happens? At the mill site? What kind of traffic would that create inbound and/or outbound? Boxcars or Containers or anything else.

JB,
Old mill site, yes. PS supposedly would bottle less water than the mill used across a given timeframe.

Containers possible, but likely also see some boxes too, as other facilities are set up to take cars down stream.

Hopper cars of plastic pellets seem likely. Poland Spring does get a lot of their pellets from recycling.

They will probably have a lot of clean up work to do if they built on the mill site in Lincoln!

Pretty sure they have a greenfield in mind.

Why would they get covered hoppers of pellets? Do they make their own bottles on site?

Yes.

That's pretty cool. Lincoln could use a pick me up in the local economy. It's a shadow of what it was back when i was a teenager.

I think PS uses quite a lot of plastic pellets for making bottles. If I am not mistaken, they used to transload them to trucks via St. Lawrence & Atlantic in Auburn, but now it is done via Pan Am in Rigby Yard. When in the vicinity of Rigby I see a pretty steady stream of pneumatic tank trailers going back and forth. There is a truck weighing scale directly in front of the Rigby parking lot. If Lincoln is chosen, it will be interesting to see if their covered hoppers of plastic pellets make the entire trip.

Local TV stations saying that the Lincoln Water District and PS have an agreement for the construction of a bottling facility with the water districts governance. Local WD rep said that this will make it possible for the WD to make upgrades to its infrastructure without raising rates to it's present customers. The news segment didn't discuss where the facility will be located.

"Tuesday night the company and the Lincoln Water District signed what is essentially a ten-year a lease agreement to use water from the town.

The water is what Lincoln used to sell to the mill, which closed in 2015.

In total, between paying for the product and leasing the land for a loading station it's a deal that will pay Lincoln Water around a quarter million dollars annually."

This article mentions a loading facility.

http://www.wabi.tv/content/news/Poland- ... 17993.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Eimskip has found themselves another customer. Also interesting: Eimskip is leasing warehouse space from this customer. And the customer has direct mainline rail access at their Wells plant.

Portland Press Herald wrote:Village Candle in Wells has started a major export push, building on a toehold in the United Kingdom and continental Europe.

“The international market is huge. We think it can be equivalent to the U.S. market for us in three to five years,” Village Candle President Jeanne Hulit said during a tour of the candle factory and warehouse Monday.
. . .
The factory can turn out 35,000 candles a day, Hulit said.
. . .
To one side of the warehouse is a separate room where the company keeps its candles destined to go overseas. International sales are currently about 25 percent of the company’s revenues, but Hulit expects that to double in two years.
. . .
Village Candle also arranged for distributors to use trans-Atlantic shipping routes with Eimskip, which leases some of its warehouse space.

That makes it easy to load candles into empty shipping containers that depart from Portland, less than 40 miles from Wells, Hulit said. Before, the company exported from New York and New Jersey, leading to product risk and transportation delays.

https://www.pressherald.com/2018/03/20/ ... -atlantic/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I just read this yesterday:

PVRR
The Yankee Candle wax transload operation (see pic below) no longer exists in Holyoke MA. Once touted as a local manufacturing success story, it is now said that Yankee Candle imports its candles. Globalization strikes again.

So we have the Yankee Candle Company in Mass. importing their candles and The Village Candle Company in Maine exporting theirs. Seems like someone could just send the imported candles to the foreign importers and eliminate the middle man.