(The following article by Dennis Cauchon was posted on the USA Today website on October 10.)
WELCH, WVa. — “Big Four #2,” an old railroad tunnel near Welch, W.Va., will have its top blown off to make way for modern freight trains.
The Norfolk Southern Railway will “daylight” the 174-foot-long tunnel as part of one of the biggest tunnel-expansion projects in the nation’s history. The railroad will raise the heights of 28 tunnels, stretching more than 5 miles in total length, through the Appalachian Mountains.
The tunnel raisings, invisible to motorists and even most local residents, will have a profound effect on East Cost shipping and the economies of some of the poorest Appalachian communities.
This new “Heartland Corridor” will clear the way for automotive trains and double-stacked freight cars to travel directly from the busy port at Norfolk, Va., to Chicago. It will cut a half-day and more than 200 miles off the trip.
Consumers will save money because double-stacking trailers on freight trains reduces shipping costs about $500 per cargo container. It should lighten highway traffic, too, because each train replaces about 300 trucks.
Most important, it will give poor mountainous areas in West Virginia a chance to enter the global marketplace. Smaller rail tunnels, built early in the last century, made it impossible for mountain towns to compete for manufacturing plants that require access to modern freight trains.
“It’s all about height,” says Patrick Donovan, executive director of the West Virginia Public Port Authority.
Big Four #2 is the only one scheduled to have its roof taken off to create the Heartland Corridor. Most tunnels are round and will have their ceilings “notched” to make them square and able to handle bigger trains. The project also will clear 22 other obstacles, such as a bridge overpass in Ironton, Ohio. The project is to be completed in 2009.
Federal aid helps project
The rail tunnels are used heavily now for hauling coal. They will be expanded 1 or 2 feet to nearly 21 feet in height, tall enough for two 91/2-foot cargo bins stacked atop each other. Containers that size — a worldwide standard — can be transferred from ships and unloaded to trucks for delivery.
“We can make money on this route when we double-stack,” Norfolk Southern Vice President Robert Martinez says. “If we can’t, the business is marginal.”
The federal government is paying $95 million of the $150 million cost of raising the tunnels, which are on private property owned by Norfolk Southern.
Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W. Va., a House transportation committee member, was key in getting the rail project included in a six-year, $286 billion highway appropriation in 2005.
“We consider it pork,” Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a non-partisan group, says of the rail tunnel project. “The (Bush) administration did not ask for the money, and the project did not compete under the usual formula to determine who deserves federal grants.”
Tim Lynch, senior vice president of the American Trucking Associations, says his group did not object to the Heartland Corridor. “But we have concerns that the Heartland Corridor will beget 20 other railroad projects that are funded from the Highway Trust Fund, paid by highway users,” Lynch says.
Unlike the trucking industry, railroads own their rail lines and the land underneath them.
Norfolk Southern calls the Heartland Corridor an example of a public-private partnership. The governments of West Virginia, Virginia and Ohio also are expected to contibute. Norfolk Southern will spend $46 million on the tunnels.
“In the absence of public money, this project wouldn’t go forward,” Martinez says. “Norfolk Southern couldn’t justify the investment.”
About 15% of the nation’s rail lines are cleared for double-stacked freight cars, says Jim Blaze, an economist at Zeta-Tech Associates, a transportation consulting firm in Cherry Hill, N.J.
“The cost savings from double-stacking are tremendous, but clearance projects can cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. Overpasses, trees, power lines and other obstacles limit the height of freight cars on most rail lines, especially those off major routes, he says.
Double-stacked freight cars have become the standard of international trade since the 1980s. Huge ships bring standardized cargo containers — typically 40 feet long and 81/2 to 91/2 feet tall — to the USA from China and elsewhere. The containers are transferred to freight trains for trips of 500 miles or more, then put onto trucks for delivery.
The Heartland Corridor is the biggest major railroad line that has not been cleared for double-stacked containers and trains carrying new cars. Norfolk, where the corridor starts, handles more standardized containers than any other East Coast port.
Some barriers remain
Some tunnels on other key rail lines are too small for modern cargo:
•A CSX tunnel in Baltimore blocks double-stacked cargo.
•A Canadian Pacific tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, can’t handle auto trains.
•A tunnel under Bellows Falls, Vt., blocks double-stacked trains traveling between the Northeast and Montreal.
Vermont is spending $2 million in federal money and $500,000 in state money to lower the floor of the historic 400-foot-long stone arch tunnel, built in 1851 under the Green Mountains. “We’re clearing the way for a new automotive train from (the port) in Davisville, R.I., so it can move cars to Canada,” says Dick Hosking, railroad manager at the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
West Virginia plans to build a major cargo-transfer station in Prichard to take advantage of the new trains on the Heartland Corridor and capture some international trade.
In Ohio, Norfolk Southern plans to invest about $60 million — half of it federal funds — to build a large transfer station in Columbus.
“The Heartland Corridor is a big step in what’s coming in the future,” says Gil Carmichael, a former head of the Federal Railroad Administration.
He says the country is slowly creating what he calls Interstate II, an alternative to interstate highways that will move cargo faster, have more capacity and use giant new rail yards to connect ships, trains and trucks.
“Trucks and highways can’t handle all this freight,” Carmichael says. “We’ve got to get these trains moving 70 to 90 miles an hour. The Heartland Corridor connects the East Coast to the Midwest. That’s progress.”