(The following story by Robert McCabe appeared on The Virginian-Pilot website on August 2, 2010.)
PORTSMOUTH, Va. — Mary Terwilliger’s 5-year-old son, Jacob, spent nearly three years watching as workers laid a rail line in the medians of Va. 164 and Interstate 664.
The construction wrapped up in December, but Jacob still watched – and waited. He’d grown so fascinated with trains and the building of the rail line that he pleaded with his parents to put off a family vacation in March.
“He was afraid we were going to miss the opening,” his mother said last week.
He had nothing to worry about.
Seven months after it was completed, the 4.5-mile line remains idle as its operator and state agencies sort out a tangle of contractual issues and the closure of the line it will replace.
The roughly $60 million project, paid for almost entirely with federal and state money, connects APM Terminals’ port facility in Portsmouth to the rail systems of Norfolk Southern Corp. and CSX Corp. in Suffolk.
It was built by the Virginia Port Authority to help speed cargo to and from the new terminal, take trucks off local roads and eliminate train crossings at 14 roads that the old line passes over in Portsmouth and Chesapeake.
Among those roads are Churchland and Western Branch boulevards, Cedar Lane, and Taylor and West Norfolk roads.
Before trains begin running, an operating agreement has to be signed, determining who is responsible for what on the new rail line, and a series of land transactions must take place regarding the property on the retired rail line.
“From our standpoint, I don’t know that there’s been a whole lot of delay,” said Jeff Allen, a Virginia assistant attorney general who serves as counsel to the Port Authority.
Complex negotiations such as these take time.
There are no major sticking points, Allen said, but the parties need to address ownership, maintenance, liability and other rail operating issues.
“I would say if there was some hold up, it was probably that we had not fully brought VDOT into the process,” Allen said. “At this point, they are fully into that process because they own the median where the rail is.”
The state sent its revision of the paperwork before July 4 to Commonwealth Railway, which operates over the line.
Commonwealth is owned by short line operator Genesee & Wyoming, based in Greenwich, Conn.
“All parties are working together to get this operating agreement in place,” said David Bordner, vice president of Rail Link, a subsidiary of Genesee & Wyoming.
Officials at the Virginia Port Authority say they did what they were asked to do: build the new rail line.
The Port Authority’s job did not entail coordinating the various contracts and transactions related to running the new rail line, said Joe Harris, a Port Authority spokesman.
“Our charge was to get it built, to get it ready for trains,” Harris said. “We came in under budget and ahead of time.”
Kevin Page, chief of rail transportation for the state Department of Rail and Public Transportation, said the project is where one might expect it to be.
“What is under way right now is a typical transaction” when retiring an active rail line and relocating its operations elsewhere, he said.
There “has been coordination with VDOT throughout the entire process,” Page added.
However, Richard L. Walton Jr., the Virginia Department of Transportation’s chief of policy and environment, wrote in an e-mail Thursday that the state agency did not join the negotiations about the new line’s operation and closure of the grade crossings until fairly recently.
“I cannot give you an exact date but it has been within the last several months,” he wrote in his e-mail.
City engineering officials in Chesapeake and Portsmouth said they were not aware of a timetable for work to begin on the closing of the grade crossings, which are split between the cities.
When asked for more information, Earl Sorey, city engineer in Chesapeake, suggested contacting the Port Authority.
Vance Bennett, director of port development for CSX, said such delays are not unusual. He added, however, that “it’s probably taking a little longer than some would’ve hoped.”
Meanwhile, a little boy in Portsmouth waits for the rumble of trains pulling long strings of rail cars loaded with cargo containers on the new tracks.
“Honestly, with a project of this size, I would think they would have had the details ironed out,” said his mother, Mary Terwilliger. “That seems so odd. You do what’s right, you plan and you do it.”