(The following editorial appeared on the Roanoke Times website on August 21.)
ROANOKE, Va. — Tuesday’s announcement that Elliston will be the site of a Norfolk Southern intermodal rail yard isn’t likely to end opposition among the facility’s future neighbors or their elected representatives.
Montgomery County Supervisor Gary Creed’s response, “They can’t do what they’re doing,” suggests a legal challenge in the offing.
That would be unfortunate, and hardly in the best interests of those it would seek to represent.
The Elliston site now appears to be a certainty and, without question, will serve the larger economic interests of a broad region. This stop along the railroad’s Heartland Corridor will make Southwest Virginia a critical transportation link in shipping goods between the Midwest and Virginia’s port at Hampton Roads and, from there, to and from the rest of the world.
In a region struggling for fuller participation in the global economy, the potential for new jobs and investment can hardly be overstated.
Inevitably, though, that promise comes with a cost, one that will be borne most heavily by residents of the beautiful, still largely bucolic Elliston area. The people in the immediate vicinity object, quite reasonably, that a freight transfer operation will hurt their quality of life.
They can fight on in the hope, still, of stopping the project, possibly by trying to make the case that federal law exempting railroads from local zoning ordinances violates the U.S. Constitution.
Or they can continue their fight more productively along a different track, and turn their energies to pressuring rail and state transportation officials to make the intrusion into their community as painless as possible. Any road realignment or road spur, buffers against sound and visual pollution, should be planned with advice from and sensitivity for the people who will be living with the results.
They should insist on transparency as plans for construction take shape. After all, the public will be investing heavily. Virginia will spend tens of millions of dollars to make the Elliston site ready for the intermodal facility, where trucks will be able to transfer double-stacked freight containers onto rail cars for shipment to and from the nation’s interior.
The Heartland Corridor is nothing less than a new trade route, with Southwest Virginia as a key port of call.
Not just Elliston, but a big stretch of the region along Interstate 81, can expect to suffer some ill effects if the rail yard pulls a lot more big rigs onto what is already a major north-south truck route.
But, unlike much of the pass-through traffic, these freight haulers will be links connecting a swath of economically stagnant Virginia to international markets. Not only the greater region, but Elliston, stands to prosper from that.