Vertex Railcar Corp. currently employs 105 people, a majority of whom are from New Hanover and surrounding counties, a company official said during a talk and tour Tuesday for members of the media at the company’s Wilmington facility.

The rail car manufacturer landed in Wilmington almost 11 months ago under the name Vertex Rail Technologies, described in an announcement at the time made by Gov. Pat McCrory as a Massachusetts company that planned to hire more than 1,300 people to “make specialty tank cars designed to serve the booming U.S. energy market.”

Since then, Vertex dropped “Rail Technologies,” changing its name to Vertex Railcar Corp. after entering into a joint partnership with a private equity partner and a Chinese rail car manufacturer. Other major changes include performing necessary renovations for the former Terex Crane manufacturing facility at 202 Raleigh St. in Wilmington, now the headquarters for Vertex, that have allowed Vertex employees to nearly complete two sample cars.

Foster Sayers III, general counsel, government liaison and public relations manager for Vertex Railcar Corp., provided an update Tuesday on the company’s progress in several areas, including hiring and production. In the second and third weeks of October, Sayers said, the company expects to receive facility certification for hopper cars from the Association of American Railroads (AAR), with facility certification for tank cars scheduled to follow in December.

Asked specifically about the 1,300 jobs promised in the announcement in November, Sayers said, “That projection’s still valid. We are currently hiring the first shift, which, when complete, will be about 250 people, and that should be done in the next six weeks. From there, we’ll continue to scale as market conditions allow.”

He said at the time of the initial announcement about Vertex’s plans, the price of oil was $85 a barrel, a number that has since dropped to $40, and new safety regulations governing the design of new rail cars were released by the federal government four months later than expected.

“Currently, we’re focused on completing Phase 1, and beyond Phase 1, we’ll grow as our customer orders dictate, as the market would dictate,” Sayers said. “Our plans for the facility are to get to a production of 8,000 cars per year, and to do that, we would need 1,300 people.”

Sayers had explained earlier during the media event that the company divided its plans into phases after Vertex entered into a joint venture with a private equity partner, Majestic Legend Holdings Ltd., and China Southern Railway, which merged with China Northern Railway to become China Railway Rolling Stock Corp. (CRRC) this summer. In Phase 1, he said, Vertex is filling a $25 million order for 300 hopper cars, the kind of rail cars that can haul bulk rock and sand, for example.   

“To get an operation up and running like this is no simple task, and it’s a tremendous effort that goes into it,” Sayers said.

More business for Vertex is expected to be driven by the government’s new car regulations, which will result in 200,000 older cars that will have to come off the rails in the next five years, and the projected growth in demand for crude oil, Sayers said. Vertex had previously received AAR design certifications for two tank cars and one hopper car.   

During a tour by golf cart Tuesday of the first production bay in the Vertex facility, which includes several buildings that add up to 500,000 square feet of space on 68 acres, an employee hired about two months ago described what his colleagues were working on.

“That is test car No. 1,” Jason Coffman, a former Terex Crane employee who joined the new company, said as he described a hopper car that was nearing completion Tuesday morning.

After he was laid off from Terex, Coffman, an iron worker and crane rigger who lives in Carolina Beach, traveled to jobs where he could find them, many out of town. “But I’ve got two teenage daughters and a 6-year-old,” Coffman said. “They didn’t like Daddy being gone like that.”

When the upfit for the fourth bay inside Vertex’s main production facility is finished, Coffman will be lead man over many of the final touches for the cars, including blasting and painting, brake assembly and putting on decals, ladders and hatch covers.

During the tour, Coffman expressed optimism about the company’s future.

“When we are up to full production and capacity, we will be pushing almost 1 million pounds of steel through here on a daily basis,” he said.