Major Expansion in Houston Boosts Railcar Storage

A $16.5 million expansion at Watco’s Greens Port in Houston is alleviating congestion and opening the door to customers seeking railcar storage.

Damien Cantrell is AVP of Rail and Liquids for Division A, which includes all of Watco’s southeast Texas operations. He said growth in late 2018 and early 2019 was a significant driver of the recently completed East Yard expansion project.

“We were focusing on unit trains and throughput at the time and had gotten away from some short- and long-term storage, due to the amount of track needed to facilitate the unit train business.” Cantrell said. “But we had so many requests (for storage) – almost on a daily basis – throughout 2020.”

Cantrell said that he and Commercial Sales Manager Jeff Linville “looked at the project and knew that we had to expand to keep up with the growth and get back into the storage market that we’d recently steered away from. Part of our success at Greens Port is our flexibility and the multitude of options we can offer to our current customers and the market. This expansion opens the door for many opportunities.”

The 800-acre Greens Port terminal is on the Houston Ship Channel and features seven deep water docks, nine barge docks, and direct access to three Class I railroads. With the expansion of its East Yard, Greens Port went from an overall railcar storage capacity of 1,500 railcars to 2,000 cars. The development not only gets the location back into the storage game, but also provides track space to be used for transloading and moving unit trains. Companies producing chemicals, plastics, and refined petroleum products are among those benefiting from the buildout.

Cantrell praised the Watco Design and Development group, as did SVP of Sales for Terminals & Ports Marc Massoglia.

“The team is a great asset that gives Watco a leg up on our competitors,” said Massoglia.

He said they deserved a lot of credit “for the speed to market, their attention to detail, adherence to budget, and the creative ways they overcame technical obstacles all while meeting these challenges of minimizing impact in a busy port environment.”

Director of Project Management Hamid Jadali said the 12 months of construction were broken into five phases to avoid interrupting rail and material handling operations. Project crews installed nine new tracks, extended six existing tracks, reconditioned multiple tracks, and realigned one track (8.5 miles in all). In addition, crews installed 27 new turnouts.

As with all projects, this one had its unique features. The team encountered underground obstacles such as deep abandoned foundations, concrete corridors, and old utility pipes that were once used by a steel mill that formerly stood on the property.

The total project area includes about 36 acres. To cover drainage for an area this size, 2.8 miles of drainpipe were installed. About half was installed under the tracks. Also part of the project: demolishing old structures, resurfacing over 110,000 square feet of roadway, enhancing about 10 acres of storage in adjacent storage yards, and relocating power and communication poles and lines.

Len Crescenzo, vice president for Houston sales, called the expansion at Greens Port “a great Watco story, because it shows our commitment to deploying growth capital, our focus on serving the customers of Greens Port and the shipping community in general.”

This view of the East Yard expansion at Greens Port shows the west end of the yard. The expansion includes about 8.5 miles of new, extended, reconditioned, or realigned track and new turnouts on 36 acres.