The Georgia Ports Authority has broken ground on its $126.7 million Mason Mega Rail Terminal.
The expansion will increase the Port of Savannah’s rail lift capacity to 1 million containers per year and open new markets spanning an arc of cities from Memphis to St. Louis, Chicago to Cincinnati.
The new intermodal facility will take trucks off the road and bring Georgia’s products to market with greater efficiency and will open a new corridor for American commerce to and from the Midwest, said Georgia Governor Nathan Deal.
In the first half of 2018, work will focus on constructing a pair of rail bridges that will carry a total of seven tracks connecting two existing intermodal container transfer facilities.
When complete, Garden City Terminal will have a total of 180,000 feet of rail, 18 working tracks and the capability of building 10,000-foot unit trains on the terminal. This will allow GPA to bring all rail switching onto the terminal, avoiding the use of nearly two dozen rail crossings, including those on Ga. Highways 21 and 25, for improved vehicle traffic flow.
The new terminal is expected to begin coming online by fall 2019, with project completion in fall 2020.
The Mega Rail groundbreaking is the latest in a series of Governor Deal’s signature transportation and logistics projects, which include the recent announcement of 50 percent completion of the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project, a new inland terminal in Northwest Georgia, and a $10 billion statewide transportation improvement plan.
