(The following story by David Patch appeared on the Toledo Blade website on September 7.)
TOLEDO, Ohio — It’s not every day a bridge is sold, but it’s about to happen in Toledo. And the price is just $1.
Under a petition now before the federal Surface Transportation Board, Norfolk Southern Corp. proposes to sell a century-old, 1,137-foot railroad bridge across the Maumee River to the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway.
For about four years, Wheeling has been the bridge’s only regular user. But during that time, Norfolk Southern has been responsible for operating and maintaining the structure referred to in the filing as the Toledo Pivot Bridge and historically known as the Toledo Belt Bridge.
“It made perfect sense for the Wheeling & Lake Erie to operate that bridge for its daily train,” said Rudy Husband, a Norfolk Southern spokesman.
Bill Callison, Wheeling’s vice president for law and government relations, said his company has asked the Surface Transportation Board to expedite handling of the petition, which includes permanent terms under which W&LE will continue running trains over Norfolk Southern tracks between Toledo and Bellevue, Ohio, and to and from an ore dock in Huron, Ohio.
While Wheeling doesn’t anticipate any objections to the bridge sale, “we don’t know how soon the STB will act,” Mr. Callison said.
In favor of the sale is the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, which had worried that the bridge might be closed and abandoned.
“It’s a crucial and strategic piece of rail infrastructure,” said Robert Greenlese, the port authority’s director of surface transportation and logistics. If necessary, he noted, the agency had been prepared to buy the bridge itself.
“The best of all worlds is that another railroad comes along and keeps it active,” Mr. Greenlese said. “Abandonment would be a death warrant, because it would be declared an impediment to navigation, and it would have to be removed. In today’s environment, there’s no way that bridge could be rebuilt again once that happened.”
The transaction is a consequence of Norfolk Southern’s 1999 take-over of most of the former Conrail rail operations in metropolitan Toledo. Not only did Norfolk Southern gain use of Conrail’s bridge over the Maumee, but the Wheeling gained operating rights into Toledo as a condition of federal approval for the split-up of Conrail assets by NS and competitor CSX Transportation.
Since late 1999, Wheeling has run trains over the Toledo Belt Bridge to make connections in North Toledo, primarily with Canadian National and occasionally the Ann Arbor Railroad.
“The most direct route to our interchange with the CN is over the bridge,” Mr. Callison said.
After rebuilding a track in East Toledo that connected its Oregon-based lines with the former Conrail bridge, Norfolk Southern shifted all of its trains off the Toledo Belt Bridge during the summer of 2000. Since then, NS trains have used the Toledo Belt Bridge only on an emergency basis, and not at all in the past year.