Columbia Coastal Resumes Portland-NY Service

Columbia Coastal Transport said it will resume its weekly container barge service March 29 from Portland, Maine, to the Port of New York and New Jersey .

The resumption of the barge service will provide relief to Maine’s shippers, who have had to ship by truck since last June. The carrier suspended the service after its primary customer, the former Red Shield pulp mill in Old Town, north of Bangor, went out of business.

The mill was shipping 10,000 metric tons of wood pulp a month through Portland. But service wasn't economical without that base volume, so Columbia Coastal shut it down.

Before that, a container ship that called weekly and provided feeder service between Portland and Halifax, Nova Scotia, suspended operations. That left the only U.S. container port north of Boston without scheduled service.

A New York-based investment group brought the Old Town mill, about 170 miles from Portland, last year and the site has started making pulp despite a soft market for paper goods. The operation, which includes a proposed ethanol refinery, is now called Old Town Fuel and Fiber.

The mill and its pulp broker had been looking for cost-effective alternatives to trucking to move the product to New York.

With the resumption of Columbia’s barge service, the mill’s pulp will be shipped from Old Town to Portland by truck and rail, packed into containers, loaded on the barge at Portland’s mostly idle International Marine Terminal Marine terminal, and shipped to New York for export overseas.

The resumption of barge service will provide a revenue source to revitalize the marine terminal, put longshoremen back to work and offer an alternative to trucking for Maine businesses, said Jack Humeniuk, business agent for the International Longshoremen's Association Local 861. He said restarting the barge would put 15 or 20 longshoremen back to work.

“This expansion of the company’s Northern Marine Highway Service not only enables steamship lines to offer through bills of lading to and from Portland, but will give northern New England importers and exporters a ‘greener’ alternative to move multiple containers in either direction,” said Bruce Fenimore, president & CEO of Columbia Group

The company said it will use the Columbia Charleston, a 450-TEU barge that will call at Portlandon March 29 and arrive in the Port of New York and New Jersey March 31.