(The following story by David Patch appeared on the Toledo Blade websiteon April 12.)
NORTH BALTIMORE, Ohio — From their current front door, Tim and Beth Apple can see the house along State Rt. 18 in Wood County’s Henry Township that Mr. Apple was building before CSX Transportation came calling last year.
Now that unfinished house is boarded up, like several others on either side of it, and work crews have begun clearing woodlots on other land along the south side of the CSX railroad tracks that run between Hoytville and North Baltimore.
By year’s end, CSX expects to have begun building a new railyard and truck-transfer terminal – known in the business as an intermodal yard – along the south side of those tracks between Range Line and Liberty Hi roads.
At the planned facility, CSX will bring in trainloads of freight trailers and containers from Chicago and sort them into new trains made up for varying destinations on its East Coast system.
Some shipments bound for close-by destinations may finish their trips on local highways, although CSX estimates that volume will be light, at least for starters – about three dozen trucks in and three dozen out on a typical day.
With the $450,000 that CSX paid them for their old house and the 5.2 acres upon which it sat, the Apples could have moved far enough away that the railyard’s lights, and whatever noise and fumes it may release, could never bother them.
Instead, they chose to spend most of the buyout paying off debt, and last November bought a $55,000 fixer-upper on the far side of the tracks from their former home that Mr. Apple, who renovates houses for a living, has been working on ever since.
“I’ve lived around here all my life,” Mr. Apple said. “I didn’t want to move away. The trains don’t really bother me – I’ve lived here 48 years.”
Besides their desire to stay close to relatives who still live nearby, the Apples said they were persuaded that the railyard won’t be as intrusive as they originally feared by a video that CSX showed to local residents depicting operations at a similar terminal in Georgia – and by local officials’ first-hand reports from tours of that Georgia terminal.
“Yeah, there’s going to be more lights, more activity,” Mrs. Apple said. “But we don’t believe it’ll be that disruptive over here.”
“The movie really changed our minds on a lot of things,” Mr. Apple said, adding that the potential for transportation-related jobs growth in the area also was encouraging.
But just down the road, Janet Hamlin still displays a “No CSX Intermodal Railyard” sign in her yard – signs that a year ago were common throughout the rural countryside near the 500-acre site CSX is assembling, but which have mostly vanished since then.
Ms. Hamlin said the closing of two local roads, Wingston and Potter, that cross the tracks where the railyard is planned to go will make it much harder for her to get to her job at Consolidated Biscuit in nearby McComb – especially if slow-moving trains entering or leaving the facility block the remaining roads.
She thinks the Apples have made a big mistake by not running after they took CSX’s money.
“Of course, our property value is going to drop drastically,” Ms. Hamlin said. The railyard is “probably going to be lit up like Las Vegas. There goes my peace and quiet in my yard.”
And the possibility that the railyard might attract secondary development, such as warehouses or other light industry, doesn’t impress Ms. Hamlin, who considers that purely speculative.
“We’d much rather be on the other side [of the tracks], where we’d have been bought out already,” she said. “I think we’re just going to be stuck in a big mess.”
CSX expects to employ about 100 people at the terminal once operations begin, and the project is expected to employ several hundred during its construction.
So far, CSX has completed the purchases of just over 400 of the 500 acres it has sought for the facility, at a cost of more than $8 million, according to Wood County land records.
Garrick Francis, a company spokesman, said it has agreements in principle on the rest, including a 77-acre chunk right in the middle that, the land records show, still belongs to Bishop Farms, of McComb.
Keith Dailey, a spokesman for Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, said the governor met early this month with CSX President Michael Ward and came away convinced the project will be a boon for the state as a whole. “This will enable Ohio companies to get their products to market quicker, and with better distribution,” Mr. Dailey said.