
Hello CIS Newsletter Subscriber,
The past month has brought a flurry of activity to CIS. After the Heart of Georgia Railroad announced that work had begun on its bridges, CIS has followed its commitment to break ground at its Cordele Facility. Site prep work began the first week of April and has continued non-stop. The Harrod Company anticipates completion within the next few weeks. Track construction will begin soon and will be completed concurrently with the site work.
CIS purchased its first container handler from Big Red, Inc. of Savannah, GA. Big Red is well known in the industry and serves the Georgia Ports Authority along with other large industries in the southeast. The unit is currently being prepped for delivery. The unit will be in Cordele around the second week in May. We will be purchasing our second unit in the near future. We will also be closing on two yard trucks within the next 30 days as well.
Job interviews began this past week for the container handler operator position and the yard truck operator position. These will continue for the next 7-10 days. We will have our newly hired staff in place by the middle of May in advance of our June 1st opening date.
Railcar Management, Inc. of Atlanta, GA was awarded the software/hardware contracts for the yard management systems and ancillary, cab-mounted hardware. With these systems in place, CIS will offer complete visibility to all stakeholders, as well as, real time billing data. This is important to shippers that manage their containers closely and arrange specific loading/unloading schedules. The system also provides an unmatched level of checks-and-balances, assuring that correct containers are loaded/unloaded at the correct time and are billed to the specifications of the shipper.
We are also finalizing our deal with our chassis provider. We will be receiving 100 chassis in our first order. Because we will operate our own chassis fleet, we are able to keep those costs extremely low. Consequently, we will not be charging any chassis fees to shippers that utilize our facility. In most cases, this saves the shipper approximately $45 per trip in chassis fees.
We have commitments for 6000 containers for the first fiscal year from our first two shippers. This number will grow as we continue our marketing efforts into new markets that surround Cordele. Our marketing activity has intentionally been kept to a minimum until we had a better idea of when the facility would be open and train schedules decided. As we get more staff in place, these efforts will grow exponentially as we reach out to shippers in our target market.
The next six weeks will be extremely busy as we work towards our grand opening. The number of rate requests has spiked over the past few weeks as shippers become aware of our June opening. We look forward to working for those customers in the near future.
Thank, You,
CIS
Cordele Intermodal Services
(229) 938-9343
202 S. 7th Street Cordele, GA 31015 Suite 202 IDC
Cordele Intermodal Services | (229) 273-8080 | Jlafevers@CordeleIntermodal.com | PO Box 876 Cordele, GA 31010
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