For transportation officials and port terminal operators, one priority in meeting New Jersey’s freight crunch is clear: expand rail capacity. As volumes at Ports Newark and Elizabeth continue to set records, quickly moving cargo out of these entry points has become more important than ever.

"We’re not going to double the space for container terminals," Rick Larrabee, Port Authority director of port commerce, told the Foreign Commerce Club of NY last week. Larrabee said improving rail capacity was the port’s number one priority, according to the Journal of Commerce.

The annual container volume doubled from 2 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) in 1994 to more than 4 million TEUs in 2003 at all terminals managed by the Port Authority. Volumes are expected to double once again over the next ten years.

Trucks are an increasingly difficult option. Major highways are congested, and traffic is expected to increase 48% by 2025, according to the NYC EDC.

Indeed, Port Elizabeth’s rail traffic has been growing steadily in recent years. Since the 1993 opening of ExpressRail — a service that transfers cargo from ship to rail — tonnage moved by rail has grown an average of 17% annually, or twice the average growth rate of containerized cargo. The service—now managed by Millennium Rail, a joint venture of APM and Maher Terminals—was recently expanded from 10 to 18 tracks. But terminal operators worry that capacity increases are not being matched outside the port gates. At a NY-NJ Port Industry Day held earlier this month, Basil Maher argued for increased rail investment.

"We must quantify the railroad capacity requirement and integrate that into our planning efforts to make certain that the network will work in unison with the intermodal container volume expected to be handled at the port," Maher said.

Maher Terminals supports creation of rail shuttles to distribution centers in Bethlehem, Newburgh and Exit 8A on the NJ Turnpike as a way of reducing truck traffic and clearing large numbers of containers quickly out of the port. 

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