A 302-acre rail yard now under construction in Sturgeon County should help big industry in the Heartland get goods to market, say officials.
Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw announced Tuesday, Dec. 17, that Cando Rail Services had decided to build a 302-acre rail terminal in the Alberta Industrial Heartland region.
The Sturgeon Terminal, construction of which started in November, will be just west of an existing rail loop south and west of the Pembina Redwater Fractionation plant near Twp. Rd. 560 and Range Road 222.
Cando Rail is a rail support company that uses its own crews, rail lines and locomotives to load and assemble rail car shipments before handing them off to CN and CP for transport, explained company president Brian Cornick. The Sturgeon Terminal is the company’s first foray into Sturgeon County and the biggest investment the company has ever made. (He declined to put a dollar figure to the investment.)
“We believe this is the ideal spot,” he said, adding the employee-owned company had explored about five other spots in Alberta.
“If you look at Fort Saskatchewan, Sturgeon County, the Alberta Industrial Heartland, that particular location is where all the growth is coming up.”
The new rail yard is next to and will link into the CN Sturgeon “Beamer Yard” and is within a few kilometres of the Nutrien fertilizer plant, Pembina’s natural gas plant and the upcoming $4.5-billion Canada Kuwait Petrochemical Corp. plastics plant, noted Sturgeon County economic development manager Tyler Westover. The facility should help those companies plus others and farmers all get their commodities to market.
“We have so many companies that utilize rail to get their product out,” Westover said, adding rail was vital in a landlocked province like Alberta.
The yard will have about 47 km of track when built with more planned in future phases, Cornick said. The yard will have one big loop around the outside connected to a bunch of long, straight, parallel segments inside the loop. Crews will use these lines to store and shuffle around up to 1,900 rail cars at a time before hauling them to the nearby CN rail terminal for transport to the Gulf Coast, Vancouver, and other centres.
Westover said this rail yard should create construction jobs, help Sturgeon companies get their products to market faster, and make the Heartland more attractive to investors. He was still calculating the yard’s effects on the county’s tax base.
Cornick said Cando plans to hire about 64 more staff in Alberta due in part to this new facility.
“This is a big project for us, and we’re extremely excited.”
Over 20 years of co-operation has made the Industrial Heartland a strong choice for many world-class companies, Mayor Alanna Hnatiw said in an email. This new rail yard will provide companies like Nutrien and Pembina with improved supply chain management and give this region a competitive edge.
“Continued investment in Sturgeon County and in the Industrial Heartland shows that strategic and collaborative planning can overcome a number of current economic challenges.”
Residents can expect to see a lot of earth movement at the yard in the coming months and for the place to be operational by fourth quarter 2020, Cornick said.
