I was baffled by this line in your Jan. 19 editorial: “Propane moves into Maine by rail, so it would seem that New England’s largest rail yard would be the logical place to put a regional distribution hub.”

If that’s true, then every important Maine company that receives material and ships product by rail should relocate to Rigby Yard: Dragon Cement; Sappi; J.D. Irving; Sprague Energy; Poland Spring; the former DeCoster Egg Farms; GAC Chemical; Dicaperl; Burnham & Morrill, and a dozen others.

We should expect all of those companies to soon announce they’ll be relocating to Rigby Yard, because apparently that’s the only way they can survive – or so your editorial implies.

Of course, that won’t actually happen, and anyone who understands freight transportation knows that.

Your editorial started right out of the gate with an uninformed and misleading statement that ignores that there are hundreds of miles of mainline railroad track all over Maine, offering companies direct, on-site access to the national rail network. Those companies do not need to be in a rail yard, or even near a rail yard, to ship or receive by rail.

There are multiple locations in southern Maine where NGL’s storage and transloading facility could be built, with direct access to the railroad and the highway.

Your suggestion that Rigby Yard is their best and only option simply isn’t true. And if it were true, wouldn’t they have built it there decades ago instead of on Commercial Street in Portland?

If it weren’t for the Maine Department of Transportation kicking them out, NGL would have no reason to leave Commercial Street at all, proving there’s nothing critical or necessary from a business standpoint about building in Rigby Yard.

Adrian Dowling

South Portland