Railex is not only shipping Mid-Columbia wines to the East Coast.

Railex is not only shipping Mid-Columbia wines to the East Coast, now the company’s cold storage warehouse in Wallula has been approved as a bonded wine warehouse.Now winery customers can save money on storage, cut out extra steps in the distribution process and maintain constant safe temperatures for the wine.

Railex, a refrigerated rail transport company, offers five-day, non-stop refrigerated shipping from its Burbank warehouse to a similar facility in Rotterdam, New York. The cars are never separated or changed during the trip, which means there’s no chance of cars being left behind or product being lost. And the company provides GPS monitoring of each car, allowing customers to monitor progress and the status of the refrigeration system. Joe Fraser, Ste. Michelle’s vice president of operations and supply chain, said the winery has been using Railex for more than a year to ship its wine and now is storing wine at the facility, as well.

Previously the company used refrigerated trucks to ship hundreds of thousands of cases of wine each year to the East Coast. The company had tried traditional rail service, which is less expensive than trucking, but there were too many risk factors, Fraser said.The rail schedules were inconsistent — sometimes the wine would get to the East Coast in two weeks, other times it took four.
A railcar of wine could accidentally be left in switching yards, where the cars are transferred from train to train to reach their destination.And there was no way to track the car or know where it was when a distributor called to ask about the status of an order.Plus, the rocky ride on traditional railcars, with the cars being hooked and unhooked intermittently during the trip, requires extra packaging to prevent breakage.

These are all problems Fraser doesn’t have to worry about with Railex, which has made the five-day trek once a week since its first train left Wallula in fall 2006. During some heavy harvest periods, the company has amped up to two trains per week.And since the railcars stay linked together during the entire trip, no extra packaging is needed. The company can ship the wine in the same packaging it uses on semi-trucks. 

Less packaging saves the company money and means less waste and a smaller carbon footprint, something that’s very important to the company, Fraser said. About a million cases of Ste. Michelle wines will be loaded onto Railex trains this year, he said.And, although it still takes a lot of fuel to get the wine to its destination, fewer trucks are on the road.