Saturday, November 25, 2006

Construction on Erie Shipbuilding rail siding to begin soon

Soon construction will begin on a $700,000 rail siding from the CSX Siding along the Bayfront Highway into Erie Shipbuilding. The at-grade crossing will allow Erie Shipbuilding to receive rail shipments of steel that they'll be needing for the new articulated tug/barge unit the company will begin building in early 2007 for their sister company, VanEnkevort Tug & Barge. Both VETB and ESB are owned by Dirk VanEnkevort.

The siding will cut approximately 240 truck trips per year from the Bayfront Parkway, and will allow the shipyard to reduce congestion on the Bayfront, as the rail crossings will take place at night and during weekends, and other off-peak traffic times. The CSX siding connects to the CSX Bayfront Trackage, which runs along the Bayfront Connector and connects to the CSX and NS railroad tracks that run east/west through Erie.

In today's JOSEPH H. THOMPSON/THOMPSON JR. update, the pair arrived in Stoneport at around 0300 this morning.

Erie Shipbuilding's website is now up and running. In addition to company information it includes some awesome photo galleries of their projects, especially the THOMPSON JR. So far, this is a list of the yard's projects, in chronillogical order:

-The BUCKEYE conversion into the barge LEWIS J. KUBER
-The THOMPSON JR. repowering
-The THOMPSON barge's five year survey
-The local sand dredge J.S.St. JOHN's five year survey

The St. John concluded her season on November 13 and is now in lay-up at the Old Ore Dock. She'll be back out in April.

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