Rail tale: Don Croteau made 15 overseas trips to secure the biggest deal of his career, inking a partnership with Chinese investors that could send Wilmington's wheels spinning.

• Author: Maurer, Kevin

It was two hours into his siege when Vertex Railcar Corp. CEO Don Croteau finally gave up and left central China's capital city of 10 million people for the long flight back to the United States. It was April 2014 and Croteau had traveled to the Wuhan offices of China Southern Railway to talk the $32 billion transportation giant into a partnership. At the time, Vertex was more of an idea than a business. It had no factory and had never produced a rail car, yet Croteau was convinced Vertex could break into a lucrative market. But first, he needed China.

His most recent work involved building towers for wind turbines and vacuum chambers that eliminate air bubbles for packaging at his Middleborough, Mass.-based Vertex Fab & Design. But he and his investors saw a bigger opportunity in rail cars, especially as Chinese companies step up their foreign investment, which has topped $52 billion in the United States since 2010, according to New York research firm Rhodium Group. China Southern, which dominates the railroad industry in the world's largest nation, wants to sell a lot of rail cars to transport oil, of which the U.S. is awash because of an explosion in production in recent years.

After more than a year of haggling, Vertex and CSR announced their partnership on June 11. It's small potatoes for the Chinese company, which was in the midst of its biggest deal ever back home. Also in June, China Southern completed its purchase of China Northern Railway in a $26 billion transaction that left the combined CRRC Corp. Ltd. with more than 90% of railroad assets in the nation of about 1.4 billion people.

But for Wilmington and North Carolina, the Vertex partnership promises a huge economic-development impact on a region that needs a lift. Average weekly wages trailed the state average by 7% in mid-2015, according to federal labor statistics. The number of people working in Wilmington fell faster than state and national averages during the 2007-09 recession and has increased more slowly as the economy recovered, according to a 2014 report by Gamer Economics LLC. The Atlanta-based consultants graded the region's economic development as normal or weak and questioned if various business groups were cooperating.

"There's just a lot of average in New Hanover County," Jay Gamer told Business North Carolina in November 2014. "You don't win the economic-development game with average."

It's no wonder, then, that Croteau's promise of more than 1,300 jobs in an abandoned factory have made him a celebrity in North Carolina's biggest coastal community. Vertex also represents the largest, most complex project the veteran manufacturing executive has ever undertaken.

The partnership didn't come easy. Back in the United States after his first, unsuccessful visit, Croteau started sending emails to Cliina Southern requesting another meeting. Contacts he had developed from his previous manufacturing jobs had gotten liim entry to the Chinese company, but little else. Unfazed, he made two more trips to China in 2014, before a...