From the start, ever since cargo began moving across the makeshift breakwater in 1982, there have been two knocks against Eastport: the reliance upon a single customer makes it too susceptible to the whims of a single industry; its lack of modern ground transportation makes it too much of a pier and not enough of a port.

Now, even with a new, two-berth facility at Estes Head, the knocks are louder than ever. Georgia-Pacific has been a good customer and, by backing Eastport when every shipment was a knot of trucking and warehousing snags to untangle, a good friend. But as the recent decline in the Asian forest-products market and the consequent drastic decline in Eastport tonnage shows, the need to diversify is greater than ever. And as the difficulty in diversifying shows, so is the need for modern roads and rails.

The draft of a new analysis of the port by Tactical Business Solutions of Bar Harbor is a clear assessment of a longstanding problem. If Maine lawmakers are serious about rebuilding the economy of Northern Maine, about offering hope and opportunity to its people, and about offering taxpayers a return on the $17 million investment they made in Estes Head, it is time to move on to a solution.

The shortcut to a long-term solution is rail. The restoration of the Brewer-to-Calais line is on the drawing board, starting with a transportation bond this November that will bring passenger service to the Brewer-Ellsworth portion, but the real money-maker — freight service to Eastport, actually to a more doable rail/truck depot in Perry or Charlotte — is several planning stages away and is five to 10 years distant. That’s too much time and too many uncertainties.

The importance of rail to cargo shipping is well established. It is, along with deep water and proximity to markets, one of the three primary criteria shippers use in choosing ports. Eastport already has one — the deepest water on the East Coast. Rail would give it another. In the shipping business, as in many other things, two out of three isn’t bad.

Tactical Business Solutions also recommends that Eastport reinstate the position of a full-time port director to beat the bushes for small shippers who could boost tonnage a container or two at a time. It’s a good idea in theory, but one made increasingly unrealistic by the current drop in G-P shipments. Declining revenues makes funding a full-time position tough. Declining shipments drives up per-ton costs, making attracting new customers also tough and making a renewed marketing effort more crucial than ever. It’s a vicious cycle that must be broken.

Lawmakers can break it by helping to fund a marketing position and by putting freight rail to Eastport on, pardon the expression, the fast track. The state economy is surging elsewhere, revenue surpluses continue, these are the good times that provide the means to help regions most harmed by the bad. Otherwise, Estes Head will never be more than the pier that never quite panned out.