City activates rail spur near Sunport, hoping to drive economic development

The city’s rail spur vision is officially in motion, with its first activation and client fueling hopes of reshaping the region’s transportation network and economic growth.

Three years after the Aviation Department acquired portions of a defunct rail spur formerly known as the Kirtland Rail Spur near the Albuquerque International Sunport, New Mexico Transloading has officially put its first segment to use, Aviation Department officials told the Journal on Wednesday.

Manny Manriquez, the Aviation Department’s acting director, said the activation will enable more efficient cargo transportation to support industrial projects in the region. The Albuquerque area has an undeveloped rail system despite being at the intersection of Interstate 40, Interstate 25 and several main rail lines, Manriquez added.

“Building out our rail spur enables us to handle and process much higher volumes of commodities and cargo so that we can make New Mexico a more attractive place for companies to invest,” Manriquez said. “It’s really a project that enables a cleaner, more efficient flow of cargo and puts Albuquerque on the map as a higher level operator of logistics.”

Department officials saw the impact of growing a city’s multimodal capacity by researching and visiting places like San Antonio, Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama, the latter of which sees an annual regional economic impact of $1.8 billion tied to Huntsville’s multimodal port.

A rail spur is a short railroad track that branches off from the main track to serve a specific site, usually an industrial property or transiting and multimodal facility. The Aviation Department’s rail spur branches off from the BNSF Railway.

It cost the department $850,000 to purchase the spur from the federal government, which once used it to transport equipment and personnel between Los Alamos and the Trinity Site, according to Lisa Abeyta, acting deputy director of the department.

“It has this long, storied history in the landscape of New Mexico, and it’s really kind of exciting that the new chapter of it is now to bring economic development and jobs,” Abeyta said.

Manriquez described the acquisition as a steal, considering the rail spur is worth millions due to a portion of it running under I-25. A rail underpass typically comes with a hefty price tag and is “almost impossible” to get approved in modern times, Abeyta said.

The rail spur’s activation also enables expansion for New Mexico Transloading, an Albuquerque-based, privately owned transload and transporter facility that offers rail transportation to more than 400 local and international companies transporting heavy equipment, including miles of gas pipe, plastics and beams.

“Anything under the sun that keeps America moving and our state going,” said Brian Connell, New Mexico Transloading’s director of business development.

“This will significantly impact the kind of work they can now bid on,” Abeyta said.

New Mexico Transloading invested more than $1 million into rehabilitating a 1½-mile stretch of the rail spur, which spans land between Broadway and Rio Bravo SE. The company broke ground in March and completed the project in September.

The Albuquerque company will use the activated rail spur portion to park and store train cars that are waiting for offloading, increasing the company’s capacity for overflow, Connell said.

But the rail spur is just one part of New Mexico Transloading’s plan for growth. The company also purchased 27 acres of land adjacent to the activated track and plans to build its second transloading facility there. Connell said the facility is in the early planning stages and will significantly expand operations and opportunities for regional economic development.

“Our hopes for the future are to really develop the Mesa del Sol (area), their tech and industry sector, as well as the Sunport south acquisition,” Connell said.

The Aviation Department recently purchased 387 acres of land south of the Sunport. The parcel occupies a key portion of the rail spur needed to encompass the city’s vision of developing a multimodal hub near the airport.

Part of the vision for the 387 acres could include the development of storage facilities, warehousing offshoots or a multimodal processing facility — an entirely separate beast of a project that Manriquez said is yet to be defined.

“It’s going to require partnership. It’s going to require a lot of deeper visioning, and it’s going to require some really sophisticated analysis of the way that our economy is growing,” Manriquez said.

New Mexico Transloading hopes to continue partnering with the city and rehabilitate the rest of the rail spur, which Manriquez and Abeyta estimate will cost roughly $10 million.

A timeline and funding plan haven’t been determined, but Abeyta said that the department’s recent land acquisition was key to kicking planning into a faster pace.

“We can move now, but we don’t want to move independently without making sure that all of our partners are aware of what we’re considering and getting their feedback,” Abeyta said. “This will impact the state. It’ll impact county efforts. We want to make sure that we are being very considerate of what those will be, so that they can also extract benefit from us all working together.”

Connell said New Mexico Transloading’s early investment in the project speaks to the company’s belief that it will play a major role in growing New Mexico’s manufacturing and industrial sectors and help bring more high-paying jobs to the state.

“I would bet my last dollar on it,” Connell said.