PHILADELPHIA — The State of Delaware and the Norfolk Southern Corp. have agreed to create what they think is the nation’s first toll bridge for railroads, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
The tolls will be used to repair the bridge, strengthening the nearby Port of Wilmington and other rail users as well as allowing the state to run passenger trains over Norfolk Southern tracks between Wilmington and Dover, possibly within six years.
The improved freight-rail and future passenger service will ease congestion on U.S. Route 1 and other highways, Nathan Hayward 3d, Delaware’s secretary of transportation, said.
There will be no toll takers, and locomotive engineers won’t be tossing quarters into a basket. The nation’s railcars already are equipped with a computer chip – akin to the white E-ZPass boxes on car windshields that now speed motorists over area toll roads and bridges – that tracks their movement.
So railroads will be billed automatically when their railcars cross the venerable Shellpot Bridge over the Christina River near the Port of Wilmington.
The deal came together, in short, because the state, which owns the Port of Wilmington, wanted Norfolk Southern to reopen the bridge, which had been closed for nearly a decade. The bridge needs $13.5 million in repairs, which is more than the railroad felt it was prudent to invest. The swing-span structure, built in 1888, mainly served the port – and state policies and subsidies determine how much business is generated there.
The state agreed to take the risk and pay for the repairs, said Craig Lewis, a Philadelphia-based Norfolk Southern vice president.
Norfolk Southern’s bridge tolls will range from $35 per car for the first 5,000 that cross the bridge in a year to only $5 per car after 50,000 crossings.
With the bridge closed, freight cars have had to access the Port of Wilmington, and key industrial sites, over Amtrak’s high-speed Northeast Corridor, moving only late at night when passenger-train traffic is low.
This causes costly delays that have put rail shippers at a competitive disadvantage, Haywood said. The detour also has caused scheduling problems for rail shipments out of the DaimlerChrysler AG plant in Newark, Del., he said.
Moreover, Amtrak limits weight to 256,000 pounds per car, 30,000 pounds lighter than the freight industry standard, which adds to the cost of shipping coal to the Indian River electricity generation station in Delaware and other destinations, Haywood said.
Reopening the bridge late next year will make the Port of Wilmington more competitive against rivals Philadelphia and Camden, said Haywood, who also is chairman of the port. It will allow expansion of the automobile import and export business for General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., and others as well as for other cargos.
For any shipment going more than 200 miles, rail typically saves money. But with the bridge closed, only about 10 percent of cargo through the Wilmington port moves overland by rail, Haywood said.
Conrail Inc., the Philadelphia freight railroad, owned the bridge when it was closed. Conrail was subsequently acquired and broken up by Norfolk Southern and CSX Corp., and Norfolk Southern now owns the bridge.
The toll-bridge deal, expected to be announced next month, could be a model for public funding of rail facilities “in a manner similar to what already exists for truck transport,” Norfolk Southern’s Lewis said.
“It is good for the state and it also a wonderful bridge,” Haywood said.