Port of Wilmington to receive $18 million from RAISE program for rail upgrades

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — The Port of Wilmington is one of many projects nationwide to receive part of the more than $2.2 billion from the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity program.

The goal of the RAISE program is to help urban and rural communities move forward on projects that modernize roads, bridges, transit, rail, ports, and intermodal transportation and make our transportation systems safer, more accessible, more affordable, and more sustainable.

The Port of Wilmington will receive $18,054,000 for a new intermodal facility. The project will construct a state-of-the-art area for loading and discharging containers on and off the rail at the Port of Wilmington. It will include four dedicated rail sidings, pave approximately 9.7 acres around the rail siding, and deploy three specialized and dedicated reach stackers to unload/load rail cars.

The goal of the project is to create a state-of-the-art, dedicated, and safe area for loading and discharging containers on and off the rail at the port to reduce vehicle miles traveled and support efficient transportation design. The project will divert nearly 250,000 container boxes from trucks to rail over the next decade. This will speed up the movement of goods to and from the port, and benefit the local and regional populations by creating new jobs.

“We are proud to support so many outstanding infrastructure projects in communities large and small, modernizing America’s transportation systems to make them safer, more affordable, more accessible, and more sustainable,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Using funds from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this year we are supporting more projects than ever before.”

The $2.2 billion if part of this year’s allocations from President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides an additional $7.5 billion over five years for the program to help meet the strong demand to help projects get moving across the country.