(The following story by Peter Frost appeared on the Daily Press website on March 4.)
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Norfolk Southern opened on Monday a $68.5 million rail terminal in Ohio that will handle cargo from the port of Hampton Roads and one day anchor the railroad’s forthcoming Heartland Corridor project.
The new Rickenbacker Intermodal Terminal near Columbus, Ohio, handles six trains daily — four to and from Chicago and two between Norfolk and Columbus — and has the capacity to handle more than 250,000 cargo containers a year.
The terminal will play a crucial role in handling the additional cargo heading its way once the Heartland Corridor is completed in 2010, said Rudy Husband, a Norfolk Southern spokesman in Ohio.
The Norfolk-based railroad’s existing Columbus terminal had reached capacity, and the company was “to the point where we were turning business way,” Husband said.
By enlarging 28 railway tunnels between Hampton Roads and the Midwest, the $150 million Heartland Corridor project will allow for freight containers to be stacked two-high on trains, cutting more than 200 miles off the trip and reducing travel time to Chicago by 12 hours.
Once the corridor is completed, the railroad will add an additional two routes between Norfolk and Columbus, said Robin Chapman, a corporate spokesman.
“Those are two, double-stacked trains, so that will be big jump in the volume of containers going through there,” he said.
Now, double-stacked trains are diverted on longer routes through Harrisburg, Pa., and Knoxville, Tenn. Norfolk Southern began its first tunnel-widening project in November near Radford.
Without the added capacity in Columbus, the benefits of the Heartland project wouldn’t be as significant, company officials said.
When it opened Monday, the Rickenbacker terminal becomes the largest “intermodal terminal” of Ohio. Those types of terminals can handle containerized cargo carried by trains, trucks and ships.
It was designed with “significant expansion capability” to deal with increased traffic volumes and has nearby property available to store excess containers.
Both the new terminal and the Heartland Corridor are public-private projects.
Elaine Roberts, chief executive of the Columbus Regional Airport Authority, a partner in the project, said in a news release that the new terminal would add 20,000 new jobs over the next 30 years.