(The following report by David Pendered appeared on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website on November 7.)
ATLANTA — Atlanta is taking a fresh look at its old railroad lines, those arteries of commerce that breathed life into the city in its infancy and now are potential sites of redevelopment.
Railroad corridors and even entire railroad yards are smack in the middle of some of the city’s hottest real estate niches. The big buzz right now involves an out-of-use rail line on the eastern fringe of Midtown that is to be sold to Wayne Mason, an investor from Gwinnett County.
Mason hasn’t revealed his plans for the corridor, part of the city’s proposed Belt Line, which slices through an area that has experienced tremendous reinvestment. But he has a history of winning his wagers on real estate.
Property values in Midtown and its environs are expected to continue their rising trend line, in part because the government intends to improve Midtown’s access with one new and one expanded bridge across the Downtown Connector. Developers are keeping pace with a building boomlet of residences, office and retail space.
Two railroad yards near downtown Atlanta are at the center of other dreams of redevelopment.
One, in a community called Cabbagetown that’s just southwest of Little Five Points, is ideally situated for rebirth as a live-work-play community. Housing values nearby have skyrocketed as buyers seek intown locations. The price spike preceded the announcements of big private and public investments less than a mile to the east and west of the rail yard.
The other yard, west of Georgia Tech, is the biggest expanse of land inside I-285 that could be redeveloped. A planning study of the area is under way, funded by the Atlanta Regional Commission. But more than a year before the study was even funded, developers had launched a building spree of detached and multifamily residences near yards owned by Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads.
The only problem with big plans for the rail yards and some rail corridors is that the railroads have no plans to give up their land.
“There are no plans to sell the Hulsey Yard in Cabbagetown,” says Craig Camuso, a spokesman for CSX. Likewise with Tilford Yards, the CSX spread west of Georgia Tech, and the portion of the proposed Belt Line near Tilford Yards.
Norfolk Southern spokeswoman Susan Terpay was less specific than Camuso. But she made it clear that its huge Inman Yard, west of Tech, is not up for grabs.
“We have about 50 trains in and out of Inman Yard every day, and it’s a Southeastern hub,” Terpay says. “Atlanta has become such a crossroads for [rail] traffic that we had to open another yard in 2001 in Austell to handle the influx of business.”
Jackson McQuigg explains why the business side of railroads is somewhat overlooked in the frenzy to redevelop intown tracts. McQuigg has written three books on railroads when he’s not busy overseeing capital projects as a vice president with the Atlanta History Center.
McQuigg says visible signs of the railroad industry have all but disappeared from Atlanta. In downtown Atlanta trains are concealed by big buildings, and the big switching yards are in areas that for years were not traveled by many residents. For the most part, trains are a rare sight.
“Atlanta obviously is a city built as a result of its railroads and has benefited from railroads paying a significant amount of taxes,” McQuigg says. “But Atlanta has struggled with its status as a railroad town for many years. As the railroad gulches were built, railroads became less a part of everyday life.”
But despite their low profile, railroads play a crucial role in the region’s economic development and in reducing traffic, McQuigg says.
Businesses that rely on telecommunications benefit from access to fiber-optic lines that typically are laid in railroad rights of way, McQuigg says. Air quality benefits because railroads transport goods that otherwise would go by truck.
But despite the reality check about planning too much too soon around railroad land, it’s a good thing to plan for a future when, and if, that land becomes available for development, says Mike Dobbins, a former Atlanta planning commissioner who now teaches urban planning at Georgia Tech. In that spirit, students of one Tech professor do a classroom project in which they create plans for redeveloping Inman Yard.
“In academia, the sky’s the limit,” Dobbins says. “But every now and then, an idea, while not really viable at that moment, takes root. If it meets a need and can be funded, it could happen.”
That’s just how the planned Belt Line got its start. As a Tech graduate student, Ryan Gravel dreamed up a plan for retooling tracks around Atlanta into a garland of green space and transit. Gravel’s master’s thesis made the rare leap from a shelf into the political arena, where it became the nucleus of the current push to build such a project.
Mason is one of those who bought into Gravel’s idea. At a reported cost of $25 million for 4.6 miles of rail corridor.