Alabama's $100 Million Inland Rail Terminal Is a Year From Opening — and Drayage From Mobile Is What It's Built to Replace

The Alabama Port Authority is building a 272-acre Inland Container Transfer Facility in Montgomery designed to move about 60,000 TEUs — roughly 30,000 forty-foot containers — a year between CSX rail and truck, at a total project cost of nearly $100 million. Groundbreaking was in February 2025; the authority's most recent construction update, published Jan. 29, 2026, put the facility on track for an early 2027 operational launch, with site grading and subsurface utility work complete and rail infrastructure — three miles of CSX siding track and three operational process tracks — underway.

The authority separately confirmed equipment procurement in a Sept. 25, 2025 release: two Konecranes rubber-tired gantry cranes, built with what the vendor describes as smart yard-management technology, with delivery scheduled for late 2026, ahead of the facility's opening.

The project sits inside a broader wave of industrial investment the authority has tracked since it first announced the ICTF in 2022. The January 2026 update put private-sector investment within five miles of the site at more than $4 billion accumulated since that announcement — up from the roughly $3 billion the authority had cited at the February 2025 groundbreaking, a pace of growth the authority has repeatedly framed as evidence the rail facility is arriving alongside, not ahead of, the demand for it.

What the facility actually does

An ICTF is not a port; it is a rail-truck transfer yard. Containers move by rail between Montgomery and the Port of Mobile — roughly 170 highway miles south — then transfer to truck for final delivery, or the reverse for export cargo originating inland. The facility's direct highway access to Interstate 85 and U.S. Highway 31 is built specifically for that last-mile truck leg. Until the ICTF opens, that entire Mobile-to-Montgomery corridor moves exclusively by truck.

What it means for drayage and inland carriers

• The Mobile–Montgomery truck lane is the one to watch. Once the ICTF is operating, containers that currently move the full 170 miles by highway will shift to rail for the trunk haul, with trucking confined to the shorter final-mile legs at each end. Carriers whose business model depends on that long-haul drayage lane have roughly a year of visibility to diversify before volume migrates to rail.
• The facility is sized for a specific customer base, not general cargo. At 60,000 TEUs annually, this is a modest-scale ICTF by national standards — well below the volume of established inland ports — but it is positioned in a state where auto and EV-supplier manufacturing investment has been concentrated. Forwarders serving Alabama's Hyundai- and Kia-linked supplier network, rather than general import/export shippers, are the more likely early users.
• A year of lead time is exactly enough to plan, not enough to wait. With cranes arriving late 2026 and the facility targeting early 2027, shippers and 3PLs with multi-year Alabama distribution contracts should be modeling now whether routing through Montgomery via rail beats their current all-truck Mobile drayage on cost, not waiting until the facility is running to find out.

The authority has not yet published a fixed opening date beyond "early 2027," and crane delivery — the remaining major procurement risk — is still roughly a year out. Both are worth checking again as 2026 closes.