The three new customers are: Hassell & Hughes Lumber Company, located in Collinwood, Tennessee; Synagro Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Houston, Texas; and Smelter Services Corporation, located in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee. Including these customers, TSRR anticipates moving approximately 7,000 carloads of freight annually and serves a total of 32 customers.
Hassell & Hughes will be moving bagged and palletized hardwood pellets via TSRR from the Port of Florence to locations in the Northeast and West. TSRR, utilizing its intermodal and transload services at the port, will transload material moved by truck to a warehouse in Florence to rail boxcars.
For Synagro, TSRR completed extensive track work in order to secure new traffic that will be interchanged at Natco, Tennessee. TSRR will be receiving shipping containers on rail flatcars at Natco and moving them to Coal Island in Florence, Alabama. At Coal Island the containers will be offloaded and then placed in storage or loaded directly on trucks for delivery.
At its Mt. Pleasant location, Smelter Services will be shipping out aluminum castings in boxcars and receiving salt and potash in covered hoppers. In order to secure the move, TSRR worked with Smelter Services to develop a new spur track layout. The 1,200-foot spur track, being built with the help of Crouch Engineering, has potential for increasing carload traffic to Smelter Services in the future.
'This new business demonstrates how short line railroads such as TSRR work closely with customers to provide customized transportation service solutions in a cost efficient and safe manner,' said Stan Wlotko, Patriot Rail's Senior Vice President ' Operations. 'TSRR General Manager Matt Prince and his team have done a tremendous job taking advantage of the railroad's unique port access and intermodal service capabilities to secure these new customers.'
TSRR has also commenced taking delivery of 6 refurbished GP- 10 locomotives painted with Patriot Rail's new color scheme. The locomotives, provided by National Railway Equipment Company, have been upgraded with N-Force technology and will replace older locomotives in TSRR's fleet. The N-Force technology is a wheel slip system that allows a 1,700 horsepower locomotive to have the traction effort of a 2,300 horsepower locomotive, thereby allowing the railroad to move more carloads with the same number of locomotives. The locomotives are also the first with Patriot Rail's new corporate-wide paint scheme of red, white and blue with gold trim and lettering. The front of the locomotive has the Patriot Rail logo while the railroad's name is displayed on the locomotive's side panel. The Company anticipates painting its entire fleet of locomotives with this color scheme.
Patriot Rail Corp. is a short line and regional freight railroad holding company based in Boca Raton, Florida. The Company currently owns and operates two short line freight railroads comprising 212 total rail miles ' the Tennessee Southern Railroad in Tennessee and the Rarus Railway in Montana.
