Inland Port Expected to Take 35,000 Trucks Off Atlanta-Area Freeways

Savannah, Georgia, will see bigger containerships come into port after the Panama Canal is widened this year. And some of that increased port traffic eventually should make its way to the Chattanooga area in 2018, when a new "inland port" is due to open in Murray County, Georgia.

That's according to John Trent, a senior director at the Georgia Ports Authority, who spoke Feb. 15 to the Chattanooga Engineers Club.

"You're going to see significantly larger ships coming through the Panama Canal, and they're going to Savannah first," Trent told some two dozen engineers at The Foundry, an upscale lounge in the Chattanoogan Hotel.

He was there to speak about the Appalachian Regional Port, the proposed $24 million "intermodal" railroad yard on U.S. 411 just north of the unincorporated community of Crandall. It's where shipping containers hauled by tractor-trailer trucks will be loaded onto freight trains for the 388-mile trip to the Georgia Port Authority's Garden City Terminal, northwest of Savannah.

The new inland port would take about 35,000 semis off Atlanta-area freeways when it opens, Trent said, and would cut 12 million miles traveled by trucks on Georgia highways.

The new facility will have three rubber-tired gantry trains, he said, that will stack and unstack containers.

"They look like the Star Wars kind of setup," he said.

The three cranes are just a fraction of the 136 rubber-tired gantry trains at the port authority's largest facility in Garden City.

"The Garden City Terminal is really our flagship," Trent said, explaining it's the U.S.'s fourth-busiest port, behind Long Beach, California, Los Angeles and New York-New Jersey. "It's truly the southern gateway into the United States."

In September of last year, dredging crews started to deepen 39 miles along the Savannah River by 5 feet to make room for the supersize cargo ships expected to begin arriving through an expanded Panama Canal.

"If you're a deep-water port, you need deep water," Trent said.

The Murray County facility will be Georgia's second inland port. Last July, the state and Georgia Port Authority reached an agreement with Cordele Intermodal Services Inc., for an inland port to ship mainly agricultural products from Cordele, Georgia, south of Macon to the Port of Savannah. The Georgia Port Authority is considering half a dozen such inland ports around Georgia, Trent said.

There's been controversy about the proposed inland port in Murray County, which will be built in a rural area on 42 acres of former cattle pasture on the eastern side of U.S. 411.

"We believe we're crossed that hurdle," Trent said of what he described as "not-in-my-backyard" complaints.

He said truck traffic from the inland port, at its peak, won't be worse than traffic was in Murray County before the economic slowdown of 2008.

"I don't think they'll be any worse," Trent said. "They shuttered a lot of [manufacturing] facilities in Murray County." The port should help bring jobs back, he said.

Trent said the port authority will take steps to soften the impact, including an 8-foot-high berm topped by an 8-foot-high wooden fence between the proposed rail yard and the Fairy Valley Baptist Church. The port authority has learned to live alongside what Trent described as the "sleepy, bedroom community" of Garden City.

"We learned a lot from that," he said, describing how the port authority made changes there to accommodate neighbors, such as replacing the beeping signals that vehicles make while backing up with "whisper alarms" that project less noise outside the facility.

The $24 million inland port will cost the state $10 million, the Georgia Port Authority $7.4 million, CSX $5.5 million and Murray County $700,000, Trent said. CSX Transportation, the largest railroad east of the Mississippi and the third-largest nationwide, will operate the intermodal facility under a memorandum of understanding signed by CSX, the state, Murray County and the Georgia Ports Authority.

The Chattanooga Engineers Club is a networking group for engineers founded in 1924, said club President Steve Stark, a patent attorney.

It meets weekly for lunch and has a monthly manufacturing plant tour. Its membership includes a large contingent from the Tennessee Valley Authority, he said, as well as retired engineers.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.