Watco recently completed a $6.7 million expansion and improvement of its rail, storage, and transloading facility in Refugio, Texas, that increased railcar capacity with a 600-unit, storage-in-transit (SIT) yard, the company said.
The project, managed by Watco’s design and development team, added 20,000 linear feet of track and more than 12,000 feet of perimeter fencing with state-of-the-art security equipment, providing a safe environment with 24/7 camera surveillance to monitor and protect customers’ railcars and commodities, Watco added.
“We’re helping our customers optimize the space at their facilities for producing product and we take away the burden of managing loaded and empty railcar storage,” Marc Massoglia, Watco’s senior vice president of terminals and ports, said in a release. “This is not an isolated opportunity. Watco can create SIT yards like this one at pretty much any of our short line railroads or any of the terminals and ports in our network.”
The 222-acre Refugio transload terminal, which is served by BNSF Railway and Union Pacific, offers 550 railcar spots and eight 2,000-ton concrete silos with on-site conveyor systems for handling bulk commodities, and transloading from rail to silo to truck in any combination, Watco said. The facility’s automatic truck transloading system can rapidly fill from multiple lanes to maximize the terminal’s truck throughput.
While the SIT yard is comprised of oil, gas, and chemical cars, the terminal handles highway-rail transloading of wind energy components, sand, and other aggregates, steel products, and agriculture products, Watco said.