Freight rail service at EPCAL coming soon

If everything stays on schedule, the first freight trains on the newly built rail spur at Calverton should be chugging into the town-owned industrial park there in about two months.

The Riverhead Town board last week voted 5-0 to authorize a contract with New York and Atlantic Railway allowing the firm to use the track now being completed at the town-owned Enterprise Park at Calverton. Ballast is being put into place and other finishing work is expected to be completed by July, town officials say.

The first two firms expected to use the rail service — which has the potential to take hundreds of trucks off the Long Island Expressway every day — are Metro Biofuel, which transports diesel fuel from its mixing facility in Brooklyn, and Eastern Wholesale Fence, which brings raw materials for its fence manufacturing from Hicksville.

The $5.5 million rail spur had its groundbreaking in May 2010, and was originally expected to take about six months to complete. The new opening schedule is important to Metro Biofuels, which does much of its truck transportation during the winter heating season.

Photo: An aerial view of the EPCAL industrial park site. (Jan. 27, 2011)