Transport 360 Doubles its Capacity
Besides expanding to Kansas City, Transport 360 has made major upgrades to the port in St. Joseph, including a tele-stacker and additional storage areas.
May 29, 2022 | News-Press Now (full link below)
Transport 360 has been continually expanding its equipment in St. Joseph to ramp up the number of barges the company can process during the navigation season on the Missouri River. Now the company has doubled its size by co-managing the port in Kansas City.
Transport 360 CEO Bill Becker said he was approached about the deal a few months before it went through.
“In our opinion, it’s a big benefit to St. Joseph to be coordinating a lot of these things, and the synergies that are available there with Kansas City,” Becker said. “We’ll see usage of the river go up, which helps both areas … different target markets in both ports.”
The port in Kansas City has unloaded five barges and the port in St. Joseph has unloaded four barges of fertilizer.
Jason Laipple is the general manager, and he pointed out that they’ve also handled a lot of rail traffic this year.
“Bringing in barges at one facility, unloading them, moving them up to the second facility,” Laipple said. “It’s kind of like you have double the opportunity to help our customers save money.”
It is estimated that each barge is seven to eight times more efficient in fuel when compared to semi-trucks, and the current cost of fuel has shown the advantages of barge traffic.
“The more barge traffic we can have on the river, the better it is because it just increases your odds of getting a backhaul,” Laipple said. “Very important to help cut freight down even on barges, just like it is with semis.”
The most popular product to bring in by barge to St. Joseph is currently fertilizer.
“Fertilizer is kind of a mainstay, and then we have a lot of grain byproducts such as distillers and (soy)bean meal that’s going to be loaded out. We have some opportunity for some steel coming in, and then you know possibly some liquid tankers going out maybe later this summer.
In comparing the two cities’ dock structures, St. Joseph has a better ability to receive heavier equipment because they are closer to the water than they are in Kansas City.
