HAMMOND, Ind. — A $75 million project to upgrade the Gibson Rail Yard in Hammond in northwestern Indiana will speed delivery of potash to retailers and wholesalers in the eastern half of the country by as much as nine days, when the project is finished in the spring of 2014.

Bob Felgenhauer, vice president of transportation and distribution for Potash Corp., said the project is a partnership with the city of Hammond and the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad, which operates Gibson Yard. Potash is spending $58 million on the project with the rest coming from Indiana Harbor Belt and tax incentives, and infrastructure improvements by the city of Hammond.

“We began talking about this in 2008,” said Felgenhauer. “We needed to do something to get around the bottleneck in Chicago.”

He said when the project is completed, unit trains of 120 cars will haul potash from mines in Saskatchewan, Canada, directly to the 89-acre Gibson Yard. Potash is based in Saskatoon, Canada; its U.S. headquarters are in Northbrook, Ill., a northern suburb of Chicago.

Felgenhauer said the yard ultimately will have a capacity to store 1,400 freight cars, with anywhere from 5-10 at a time heading out to customers daily. Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad completed the first phase of the Gibson expansion last year with a capacity of 800 freight cars. Work now is under way to add capacity for another 600.

He said the project also includes a 144,000 square-foot warehouse that spans the length of two football fields and will have a capacity to store up to 120,000 metric tons of potash.

“We found that without our own yard, we got caught in the bottleneck of rail traffic around Chicago and depended on other yards for our shipments too much,” said Felgenhauer. “We wanted to provide quicker access to our customers and Hammond offered us access to all Class 1 railroads.

“Now we can take unit trains direct to Hammond from our five mines in Saskatchewan, saving us a lot of time.”

Canada is the world’s largest producer of potash, with more than 9.5 million metric tons a year. Potash is a common term used to describe a variety of mined salts that contain potassium; it is a key nutrient in fertilizer, ranking third behind nitrogen and phosphorus. The largest users of potash are China, the United States, Brazil and India.

Felgenhauer said because of the way the nation’s railroads are configured, potash handled by the Gibson Yard in Hammond will go to customers east of the Mississippi River, primarily to the East Coast and Southeast. He said those west of the Mississippi will be handled through a freight yard in Minneapolis, Minn.

“The key to reducing our delivery time is our ability to forward-position our product beyond the busy Chicago corridor and still maintain quick access to all the Class 1 carriers,” said Felgenhauer. “Hammond allows us to do that because all the major carriers like CN, CSX and BSNF regularly use line through Hammond.”