BEAR — Old Dominion Freight Line has advanced its plans to build a new truck terminal off Wrangle Hill Road after acquiring the necessary land in March.
The nation’s second largest less-than-truckload (LTL) cargo carrier will be relocating its New Castle site to Bear to draw in freight operations from its Baltimore and Philadelphia locations.
The 89-year-old company has 20,475 employees across the country, including 85 employees in two centers in the First State. Old Dominion held a presence in both New Castle off U.S. Route 202 and north of Bridgeville. But facing a boom in the need for shipping services, Old Dominion Freight Line has set its sights on building a 50,000-square-foot facility, located on 20 acres of land off American Boulevard.
On March 23, it acquired the land adjacent from the Dot Foods distribution center from an entity associated with Bear-area developer R.C. Peoples for about $4.2 million, according to county land records.
Requests for comment on the project and its timeline for construction have not been returned by Old Dominion in recent weeks.
In 2021, the state’s job investment board, the Council on Development Finance, unanimously approved an incentive package of $394,500 to support the project then-estimated to cost $13.6 million.
“We have outgrown our current facility in New Castle so much that we had to pull freight out of it,” Old Dominion Freight Line Vice President of the Northern Region Dave Steinert told the council at its 2021 hearing. “We’ve had to focus freight in our Philadelphia and Baltimore service centers just because New Castle couldn’t handle the growth. But once we move to Bear, we will be bringing back all those routes to Delaware.”
Old Dominion handles almost all consumer goods, barring livestock and items that need to be refrigerated. It runs LTL operations, where a trucking company carries shipments from multiple customers on a single trailer which in turn raises pricing leverage for carriers.
The new facility would be one of Old Dominion’s new model centers with 70 to 80 doors for distribution, designed and built through the company’s partner contractors. Old Dominion reportedly considered Cecil County, Md., for its expansion, but ultimately signed a contract in Delaware due to its competitive edge and strategic location along Interstate 95.
The expansion would come with at least 20 new jobs, although Steinert believed Old Dominion would hire more. Once the Bear facility is built across from Dot Foods and ready to be opened, Steinert said it was likely the former New Castle center would either be sold or leased out. Operations in Bridgeville, which employs 21 people, will not be affected.
“Some of our employees [in New Castle] are from New Castle, others are from New Jersey and some are from Maryland and Pennsylvania,” Steinert said. “We would like to concentrate on adding employees that live in the Delaware area.”
