Head south on Interstate 75 from Toledo and exit west onto Deshler Road in North Baltimore. As you head through the fields, you’ll see what looks like a huge port facility, with giant wide-span overhead cranes. But there’s no open water in sight. In fact, what you’re seeing is the CSX Northwest Ohio intermodal hub, and there’s nothing quite like it in the world.

The scope of the facility is immense: seven huge million-pound, electric-powered, rail-mounted gantry cranes, each 100 feet high and with a span a bit longer than a football field, covering eight working tracks plus truck lanes and container stacks. Nine additional adjacent support tracks are well more than a mile long each. Everything about the terminal is outsized. So too was the investment required.

Opened in 2011, the CSX Northwest Ohio intermodal hub is a unique solution to an age-old railroad problem: How to maintain the economics of running large trains while providing efficient connections to a broad spider-web of locations on the system. The problem goes back just about to the birth of the railroads. Individual railcars headed for a variety of destinations needed to be sorted intelligently and efficiently into trains.

For many years, cars were “flat-switched” using locomotives to get each one into the proper train. In the late 1880s or early 1900s, depending on whose history you believe, the hump yard was invented, and the rails began to use gravity instead of the back-and-forth motion of the switch locomotive to direct the cars into the proper tracks and make up the trains.

When intermodal was introduced in the 1950s, each town had a small “circus ramp” for loading the intermodal flats, which then moved through the carload network just like any other car, rolling over the hump and onto the next merchandise train, intermixed with boxcars and hoppers and every manner of railcar. But the “loose-car” network turned out to lack the speed and consistency required to pull intermodal traffic off the highway, and the railroads began to migrate toward the intermodal unit-train concept to increase speed and improve consistency.

This brought the sorting problem front and center again. Solutions were elusive. I remember, for example, the old Southern Railroad had an intermodal “mini-hump” in Atlanta that served the purpose in the 1980s, but the coupling impacts it produced proved unsatisfactory in terms of loss and damage, and it wasn’t reproduced, as far as I know.

In the absence of a good sorting solution for intermodal, the railroads turned to a corridor strategy and began to trim the intermodal terminal network ruthlessly. Only the largest locations, capable of producing efficient trainloads of volume that could be moved direct to destination, would be allowed to remain.

One giant sorting hub remained in the U.S. intermodal network, however: Chicago. The vast majority of trailers and containers traversing the gateway were grounded and driven crosstown to the connecting road, to be placed on the proper train. In essence, rubber tires and city streets substituted for the classification yards of old.

But there’s now a growing understanding that the old approach of simplification and concentration of volume has reached its natural limit.  By its very nature, shorter-haul intermodal demands that more terminals be built closer to the origin and destination points of the intermodal load, and the challenge is how to efficiently connect this increasingly complex network without sacrificing the economics of long trains.

Further, the Chicago gateway and its attendant “rubber tire transfer” model is imposing an ever-larger burden in terms of dollars and time. How to solve these problems? The CSX North Baltimore hub is one railroad’s answer.

The hub is essentially a giant classification yard for intermodal containers, with those huge gantry cranes serving as the functional equivalent of switch locomotives. Strategically located at an operational node of the CSX east-west network, it serves CSX in much the same manner as an airline hub. Containers are flown from one train to another rather than cars being switched, although flat switching still occurs when the volume of like-destination cars in a train reaches a certain threshold. There is cost involved, of course, in terms of dollars and time, but the huge offset is that secondary terminal locations can be efficiently connected to the rest of the system via the hub, without sacrificing train length and efficiency.

Although no other railroad has opted to mimic the CSX approach, that CSX already has invested in a major expansion of the North Baltimore facility would seem to indicate it’s happy with the results. And regardless of whether it represents the ultimate solution to the intermodal sorting problem, it’s a bold approach and a big commitment to an intermodal strategy that seeks an efficient means to expand the business.