Stoughton Trailers officials announced a plan to expand intermodal chassis production later this year by beginning manufacturing products in Waco, Texas.

The new Waco facility will add additional chassis capacity to Stoughton’s already expanding chassis production capacity in Wisconsin. In December 2021, Stoughton installed a new chassis production line at its Stoughton, Wisconsin, facility.

The construction of the Waco facility is already underway and expected to be completely quickly, company officials said in a press release. Stoughton anticipates moving equipment into the new facility by March and beginning chassis manufacturing by early second quarter. The new production facility is expected to employ up to 125 people. The Waco location also Stoughton with access to seaports, railyards and chassis customer locations in the southern tier of the United States.

In Wisconsin, the company expects to employ an additional 150 people in the Stoughton plant once it is ramped up to full production. The employees will assemble chassis and manufacture components to feed the other chassis production lines.

When the Waco, Texas, and Stoughton and Evansville, Wisconsin, facilities are operating at capacity, the collective output of all three facilities will increase the run rate to approximately 20,000 to 25,000 chassis per year, hitting that rate by September 2022.

“The new Waco facility and Stoughton production line will help fulfill our customer production commitments for 2022 and beyond,” said Bob Wahlin, president and CEO of Stoughton. “By the end of 2022, the company will have invested $25 million dollars expanding our chassis production capacity. These investments would not have been possible without the remedial relief provided by the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on chassis from China.”