(The following story by Robert McCabe appeared on The Virginian-Pilot website on May 2, 2010.)
NEAR KERMIT, W.Va. — Floodlights glared deep in a century-old tunnel under an Appalachian hillside. An excavator poked at the arched ceiling like a pterodactyl.
Chunks of sandstone shattered and fell thunderously into an empty rail car.
Work has gone on like this for nearly a year. Crews begin at 2 a.m. and call it a day about noon.
In late March, they still were a few hundred feet from the south end of Norfolk Southern’s Big Sandy 1, a 2,627-foot railroad tunnel burrowed through a hill that sits along the Big Sandy River separating West Virginia from Kentucky.
Their task: to carve a higher clearance in the ceiling of the tunnel, making it big enough to handle rail cars loaded with cargo containers stacked two-high, doubling the railroad’s capacity and giving shippers more bang for the buck.
It is one of 28 tunnels that form the centerpiece of what NS calls the Heartland Corridor, a sort of Northwest Passage for double-stack rail traffic between Hampton Roads and the Midwest that will shave 230 miles and about a day of transit time from existing routes.
Combined with the Norfolk port’s 50-foot channels and ready access to the open sea, it’s anticipated to have a magnetic effect on East Coast container traffic.
In the Roanoke region, the site for a planned intermodal rail yard in Elliston — designed to shift freight between trucks and trains — was chosen for its proximity to Interstate 81 and its location on the Heartland Corridor. The intermodal yard will belong to NS and will cost $24.8 million to build. The state plans to pay $17.4 million of that as well as several million more for related road projects.
The Heartland Corridor’s taller tunnels will make Hampton Roads “much more competitive with the other ports,” said Bob Billingsley, NS’ director of structural projects, who has been overseeing the tunnel work. “That’s the only reason we’re doing it. That’s what it’s all about.”
For the past three years, working in the wee hours to avoid disrupting rail traffic, Billingsley’s crews have been raising the roofs on tunnels in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky, enabling them to handle the 20-foot-3-inch-high container trains that have had to go around the mountains, through Pennsylvania and Tennessee, because the tunnels were too small.
The railroad plans to start running the double-stack trains in September.
“It’s the biggest engineering undertaking we’ve had in the last 100 years — one of the biggest in modern railroad history, anyway,” Billingsley said.
Each one a puzzle
Each of the tunnels — 23 of them in West Virginia, four in Virginia and one in Kentucky — has presented a unique puzzle, a slightly different configuration of rock and soil.
“I’ve learned something almost every day,” said Billingsley, who after spending most of his career working with steel, including a stint overseeing structures at NS’ Pier 6 coal-loading facility, suddenly found himself a student of mineralogy and geology.
The tunnels, built about 1905, have stood at about 19.5 feet from track to ceiling. They need to be an average of 1.5 feet taller, including a 9-inch cushion, to accommodate the double-stack trains.
In five tunnels, the answer was simple: lower the track bed. In five others, the crew cut “notches” where the walls met the ceilings, allowing enough room for the corners of the containers. In one case, a bypass was built to skip the tunnel altogether; in another, the tunnel requires more extensive work.
In Big Sandy 1, as in 15 other tunnels, it meant taking out “the whole crown of the tunnel, from about 9 to 3 on a clock,” Billingsley said.
Work in this tunnel began with the boring of thousands of investigatory holes into the overhead liner, removing core samples and inserting a tiny camera that took photos of the rock and soil superstructure to assess its condition.
The excavator then went to work, pecking out the curved tunnel roof, chunks at a time.
A series of 13.5-foot supporting “rock bolts” were drilled into the exposed new “roof” before it was sprayed with quick-set concrete from a miniature concrete plant on rails.
It has been tough, tedious and dangerous work.
On Oct. 22, a crewman working on Big Sandy 3, another tunnel a few miles away, was killed, buried under more than 100 tons of rock that fell on the excavator he operated. It has been the only fatality to occur since the project began.
Progress in Big Sandy 1 means clearing anywhere from 15 to 30 feet — on a good day.
Every day they must clear the tracks before the coal and freight trains resume running, which explains the early hours.
The crew generally hits the sack when most people are having dinner, if not earlier.
“The hardest part of it has been fighting the night shift,” said Michael Parham, 29, a civil engineer from Tennessee who helped gather video and geotechnical data from the tunnel ceilings. “From 2 a.m. until the sun comes up, you’re just fighting to stay awake.”
Part of the big picture
While the tunnel work is the heart of the Heartland Corridor, its biggest effect in this region would be at the intermodal yard planned for Montgomery County.
In April 2008, after a review of 10 sites, the state said the facility would be built in Elliston. Government officials in the Roanoke and New River valleys supported the Heartland Corridor initiative, saying they expected it would remove trucks from I-81 and create jobs and tax revenue in Southwest Virginia.
Montgomery County later withdrew its support. In court, the county contends that the proposal for partial state funding of the terminal calls for an unconstitutional giveaway of public funds to a private entity and must be blocked.
In November, a circuit court judge rejected the county’s challenge. After the ruling, county supervisors voted to appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court. The appeal, which will restate the original argument, was due at the high court in Richmond in March.
The Elliston yard would ship 15,000 containers during its first year of operation, or about 60 a day, according to figures released by the state. State officials say the number of containers put on rail would approximate the number of truck trips on state roads that would be saved with the benefit of reduced road congestion.
NS didn’t include the Montgomery County terminal in its original lobbying push for government support, concentrating on the tunnel work, a rail relocation project connecting Suffolk to APM Terminals in Portsmouth and an intermodal yard in Columbus, Ohio.
The tunnel clearance cost about $190 million, while the rail relocation and Ohio terminal reached about $123 million. Federal and state funding has covered about $183 million of the $313 million, according to port documents and NS officials.
The idea of linking the three projects together evolved gradually, driven in part by the realization that, at the beginning, nobody was thinking big enough, said Robert Martinez, NS’ vice president for business development and a former Virginia transportation secretary.
“We weren’t asking for enough money,” Martinez said. “We weren’t being noticed.”
It wasn’t until a Washington lobbyist met with NS executives about five years ago that the big picture began to emerge, Martinez said.
The lobbyist advised them that the reason the tunnel project wasn’t getting congressional funding support was because the railroad wasn’t seeking enough money. He suggested combining the projects and working together to get funding.
A single project soon emerged.
“We came up with the name Heartland Corridor to brand the entire route,” Martinez said.
Another option for shipping
As the Heartland Corridor project came together, a series of events in the global shipping industry dovetailed with it.
Labor strife and congestion had been frustrating shippers into West Coast ports, prompting them to look for ways to diversify their transit options, including using East Coast ports.
Plans were announced for an expansion of the Panama Canal, to be completed in 2014, which will allow larger vessels to work the “all-water” route from Asia to ports such as Hampton Roads.
“What the Heartland Corridor will do is it will alter the strategic position of this port relative to its competition,” Martinez said.
Industry experts agree the project is a positive development but aren’t so sure it will change Hampton Roads’ competitive position with ports such as New York/New Jersey.
“Is it a game-changer in the competition between the ports? No,” said Thomas Finkbiner, who headed NS’ intermodal operations during the 1990s and now is senior chairman of the Intermodal Transportation Institute’s board of directors at the University of Denver.
“I don’t devalue the fact that it is a very big thing for the port of Norfolk, for Norfolk Southern and for taking freight off the highway,” Finkbiner said. However, “there are bigger things in the supply chain” that dictate where cargo goes.
Representatives of two shipping lines said it’s the shippers themselves — major importers such as Target, Wal-Mart and Home Depot — that decide how and where to route their cargo through U.S. ports.
“It is not a decision by the shipping line as to where we want to route this cargo,” said Frankie Lau, a spokesman for Hong Kong-based Orient Overseas Container Line. “It’s basically the customer’s choice.”
Shipping lines present importers with a menu of options that can include going through West Coast ports and railing goods to Chicago — which for Asian cargo offers the fastest transit time — or going the all-water route through the Panama Canal to East Coast ports for distribution by rail and truck.
The Heartland Corridor will put another option on the table, Lau said.
Progress is slow
But first, the tunnel work must be done.
And finishing the job means dealing with the unexpected.
In Big Sandy 4, one of the last of the tunnels to be completed by early August, workers discovered an underground spring seeping 5 gallons of water a minute.
“You never know what you’re going to find, so you got to deal with it as it comes,” Billingsley said.
The soil is so unstable above Big Sandy 4 that crews are constructing a new tunnel in the last 100 feet of the old tunnel, inserting a steel-and-concrete canopy.
Still, Billingsley said, the biggest challenge has been operating within a tight 2 a.m.-to-noon window that allows two NS trains hauling time-sensitive freight for UPS to stay on schedule.
Even though the project is about speeding such freight through the mountains, progress is measured in feet.
“You get in a pattern or routine,” Billingsley said. “You can’t be in a hurry.”