Discharging vehicles @ auto port (Annacis Island).

The story behind New Westminster as a port...

New Westminster’s largest port terminal, Pacific Coast Terminals, was built in 1929. For the next 40 years, this busy terminal helped generate economic prosperity and was part of a booming industrial sector in New Westminster. But by the 1970s it was obsolete. Why?
The short answer is globalization. Globalization in the shipping industry meant larger ships and near universal use of shipping containers to hold manufactured goods. The terminals in New Westminster were simply too small to accommodate shipping containers. But in the 1960s, even before containers became so popular, terminal operators in New Westminster began to find that their warehouses were too small to hold enough cargo to fill the holds of the larger ships. Because space was at a minimum, longshoremen remember that they sometimes moved products directly from trains onto the ships. The New Westminster (later Fraser River) Harbour Commission opened Fraser Surrey Docks as an expansion of the New Westminster terminals in 1964. It added a container terminal there ten years later. While containers are still handled at Fraser Surrey Docks, Deltaport, which opened in 1997, is the busiest terminal for containerized cargo bound for Canada’s west coast.

Source: SFU (Simon Fraser University)


All shipping activity (containers & break bulk) now take place across the river (Surrey side) or on Annacis Island (Auto port terminal).

All that's left of New Westminster port in terms of activity is the ferry service between New West & Annacis Island and a berth for the tugs that assist the in & outbound vessels for the Fraser Surrey Docks & Annacis auto port.