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Linn County Commissioner Roger Nyquist answered media questions about the center on Wednesday, Nov. 16.

Trucks will stop on the pavement to the left and their cargo will then be placed onto trains at the Mid-Willamette Valley Intermodal Center.

A map of the Mid-Willamette Valley Intermodal Center.

Linn County’s inland container port has cleared months-long delays and has all of the equipment it needs to start shipping local grass seed to overseas buyers.

Now it just needs some containers, which are expected to arrive in the next few weeks.

"Shippers will be informed when shipping lines will accept bookings from the Mid-Willamette Valley Intermodal Center," Project Manager Don Waddell in a statement.

The center is ready to begin operations in early December.

Staff and county officials opened Mid-Willamette Valley Intermodal Center for a tour Wednesday, Nov. 16, days after its official opening at the site in Millersburg where an International Paper mill once stood and closed in 2009.

"The motivator was for the agriculture industry — anything natural resource-related and any type of manufacturing or production — to be able to get their goods to consumers in the most cost-effective way possible," Linn County Commissioner Roger Nyquist said. "This helps them do that."

The container port mostly will take local agricultural freight from trucks to put on train cars headed for ocean vessel terminals in Portland, Seattle and Tacoma. Container port managers have repeatedly estimated the 60-acre site has enough demand to ship 40,000 or more containers each year.

But the freight vessels that ultimately ship large steel boxes to overseas destinations have been slow to seize on the demand, according to staff at the nonprofit economic development corporation in charge of the container yard.

"Right now, there are about 40,000 containers a year leaving our immediate area having to be trucked to the Port of Seattle or the Port of Tacoma," Nyquist said. "This gives them the option of coming here and putting it on a train."

Anyone with stuff they can put in a shipping container is a potential customer of the intermodal center. In the mid-Willamette Valley, that’s mostly grass seed growers.

More shippers send goods out of the valley than they bring in, which means the valley runs a deficit of empty containers.

Union Pacific confirmed in July that the rail operator will import freight, too, from terminals within the Northwest Seaport Alliance.

At the time, project manager Don Waddell wouldn’t say who will import containers through the Willamette center but did say distribution centers for big box retailers are likely.

Lowe’s and Target operate massive warehouses in the mid-Willamette Valley that distribute inbound shipments of freight from factories to stores throughout the northwestern U.S.

The container yard and the contractor tapped to run shipping operations, Illinois-based ITS Conglobal, serve as a sort of middleman that effectively connects the mid-Willamette Valley grass seed industry with ocean carriers.

ITS Conglobal had intended to bring in surplus empty containers by Union Pacific rails from import-heavy ports like Chicago. But sources of containers identified in container yard plans a few years ago have since dried up.

For now, one unidentified ocean carrier has signed on to take shippers’ freight from the mid-Willamette railyard. As more carriers join in, they could divert more of their containers to the valley for outbound freight.

Nyquist was among the container port’s earliest supporters.

State and local politicians pushed Oregon to select and back the mid-Willamette Valley in a competitive bid for a rail-based freight yard in 2017, when the economic development corporation was formed to apply form $25 million in Connect Oregon grant funds.

The Oregon Transportation Commission was looking to rail-based freight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and congestion on the state’s highway system — one train takes the place of many trucks.

The mid-Willamette application beat out a similar proposal in Brooks, just 28 miles north of Millersburg on Interstate 5. The state awarded another $26 million to a site in eastern Oregon.

Linn County bought the 192-acre former mill site for $10 million, then sold 60 acres to the development corporation for $9.16 million. Container yard managers said Business Oregon will court industrial tenants to fill the remaining acreage.

The container port broke ground in 2021, then missed a February opening date after construction crews found a Kinder Morgan Inc. liquid fuels pipeline buried near Union Pacific’s rails at the north end of the property.

Construction wrapped up in April at about 95% complete while rail provider and pipeline owner sorted out the rail right of way.

Crews moved the pipeline in October, and the yard opened with Union Pacific’s blessing and Oregon Department of Transportation certification Nov. 10.

"Our region has a long history of producing products that are beneficial to people around the world, from two-by-fours to the food people put on their dinner plates," Nyquist said. "This intermodal facility increases the likelihood that producers of these products will have ample transportation access to those markets which use them long into the future."

Staff writer Joanna Mann contributed to this report.

Alex Powers (he/him) covers business, environment and healthcare for Mid-Valley Media. Call 541-812-6116 or email [email protected].

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