The Eimskip container ship Westercade is scheduled to arrive Tuesday evening in Portland Harbor from Iceland. It will be delivering a new reach stacker for the city-owned International Marine Terminal.

The equipment, which will be used to move containers around the terminal, includes an attachment that allows it to move oversized cargo that doesn’t fit into a container.

The Maine Department of Transportation approved the emergency expenditure of about $620,000 to purchase the reach stacker because the container-moving equipment currently in use at the terminal is old, breaks down frequently and cannot keep up with the increased container volume, said Patrick Arnold, director of operations and business development for the Maine Port Authority, which manages the terminal.

“It will be the nicest piece of equipment we’ve got around the terminal,” Arnold said. “It will speed up efficiency while making the operations safer.”

The Icelandic steamship line Eimskip moved its North American headquarters to Portland last spring. Eimskip is now on pace to move about 5,000 40-foot containers a year, and the volume is expected to increase.

The reach stacker was manufactured in Poland by Kalmar, a company that builds cargo-handling machinery for terminals around the world, and shipped on an Eimskip vessel from Hamburg, Germany.

The Eimskip service connects Portland with Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Iceland and northern Europe.

Tom Bell can be contacted at 791-6369 or at:

tbell@pressherald.com