(The following story by Richard Powelson of Scripps Howard News Service appeared on the Knoxville News Sentinel website on March 23.)
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The state Department of Transportation plans to study freight movement projections for the next 20 to 30 years to decide whether Interstates 40 or 81 or east-west rail lines need expansion or other help.
Ed Cole, the department’s chief of environment and planning, said Wednesday in an interview that large businesses worldwide are moving more and more to just-in-time supply of goods, which requires more frequent shipments.
So the department will hire a consultant to do an 18-month study of current and projected volume of east-west shipping through the state. About 50 percent of trucks are just passing through Tennessee, not making deliveries, he said.
“We need to very clearly understand the movement particularly of container freight from Long Beach and Seattle on the West Coast and the movement of that to the East Coast and Northeast,” Cole said.
The state also has been getting input from the Tennessee Trucking Association. Its president, Dave Huneryager, was away on travel and could not be reached.
Tony Linn, director of the Nashville & Eastern Railroad Corp. in Lebanon, Tenn., has been working since the late 1990s to get federal and state support for upgrading and completing rail segments between Knoxville and Nashville.
“We haven’t dropped the project, but on the other hand we realize that something this significant is not happening in a couple years … or maybe even a decade or two,” Linn said.
West of Knoxville to Crab Orchard, for example, there is an area of about 50 miles with no current right of way for rail, he said. That right of way could be re-established, he said.
In 1999, the Tennessee congressional delegation helped approve $500,000 in federal funds for a study on whether the Knoxville-Nashville segments were cost-justified. The study found both pros and cons to the proposal.
Cole said that rail study was interesting but did not give state officials enough information about interstate use and needs versus the rail option.
The department already has identified I-40 as “a strategic 10-year investment priority” for moving freight and people east to west, he said.
Currently, he said, there appears to be sufficient east-west capability for rail, but the study will look at future needs. For example, CSX has a rail line from Memphis to Chattanooga, and Norfolk Southern’s rail line runs along the I-75 and I-81 corridor, he said.
If Tennessee added a dedicated lane for trucks along I-40 and charged a toll, the amount would be crucial to success, Cole said.
“If it were overpriced, truckers would take alternate routes and clog secondary roads,” he said. “If it’s underpriced, then we’re asking taxpayers to pay for the movement of freight.”