Agriculture By Rail – South Carolina

Darlington, South Carolina

CivilSmith teamed up with Tar Heel Railroad Construction to provide rail design services to Coker Cotton Gin as part of a design-build project. With Darlington Raceway just down the road, Coker Cotton “fast-tracked” this project to begin shipping cotton seed to their corporate partner on the west coast.

This brownfield site had been in operation for many decades, but with no rail service in many years. Although the industry’s tracks were overgrown and neglected for years, South Carolina Central’s mainline turnout remained in place and provided some good potential to bring rail service back to life.

CivilSmith worked closely with Tar Heel, Coker Cotton, and South Carolina Central RR to develop rail design layout options to efficiently serve this new operation with some unique operational requirements. Coker’s loading process included the use of a track mobile, loading chute tower, load compaction equipment, rail car tarping gangway, and rail scale.

Detailed rail design and track roadbed grading design services were provided with plans being submitted to and approved by South Carolina Central. CivilSmith provided track construction design files to the grading contractor and to Tar Heel for moving quickly into the track rehab and track construction phase of the project.