Port of Montana Completes $8MM Rail Expansion

Written by Marybeth Luczak, Executive Editor
Nathan Anderson, UP Senior Director-Public Affairs, Corporate Relations, spoke at the Port of Montana’s infrastructure expansion ceremony on Nov. 5. (Photograph Courtesy of UP)

Nathan Anderson, UP Senior Director-Public Affairs, Corporate Relations, spoke at the Port of Montana’s infrastructure expansion ceremony on Nov. 5. (Photograph Courtesy of UP)

The Port of Montana, a full-service transload, warehouse and distribution facility in Butte, celebrated the completion of an $8 million rail expansion project last month.

The project added more than 20,000 feet of new track to accommodate additional freight and longer trains, according to Union Pacific (UP), which, along with BNSF, serves the inland port.

Four new tracks are now available for transloading and daily operations, and five new development sites were added to the Montana Connections Business Development Park, UP reported on the Inside Track section of its website. The Port of Montana, located on UP’s Rocky Mountain Service Unit, transloads agriculture, fuel, petroleum, ore, fertilizer and auto products, among other commodities.

The expansion allows UP to handle an additional 4,500 incremental carloads. It was paid for in part by the Montana Essential Freight Rail Loan Program and a federal grant from the Economic Development Administration.

The Port of Montana’s newly installed rail infrastructure at Butte’s Montana Connections Business Development Park. (Caption and Photograph Courtesy of UP.)

“The expansion will yield a better operational plan for both the Port of Montana and UP,” as well as “rail growth in the western Montana market,” Nathan Anderson, UP Senior Director-Public Affairs, Corporate Relations, said at the Nov. 5 project completion ceremony.

“Even before the construction was finished, we had already added two new businesses to Montana Connections to the tune of $40 million without having actually constructed any track,” Kristen Rosa, Director-Economic development for the Port of Montana’s Connections Park, told NBC Montana.

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