NS needs to sell state official on site

(The following article by Tim Thornton and Ray Reed was posted on the Roanoke Times website on October 11.)

ROANOKE, Va. -- Norfolk Southern is convinced Elliston is the only place to build its intermodal facility. Now the railroad has to convince state officials.

Pierce Homer, Virginia's secretary of transportation, said Tuesday the Elliston site won't receive any state funding unless Norfolk Southern convinces officials that no other site can work.

Gov. Tim Kaine and Norfolk Southern already have signed an agreement for Virginia to provide $22 million for the railroad's Heartland Corridor, with $12.8 million of that specifically to develop an intermodal site.

"There are other sites they are looking at," Homer said. "These are public dollars, ultimately."

State officials asserted their role in the intermodal site selection in a letter Oct. 6 from Matthew Tucker, director of the Department of Rail and Public Transportation, to Norfolk Southern officials.

"Since public dollars are involved, transparency and openness in the evaluation and selection process for a site is critical," Tucker's letter said.

Homer declined to say what prompted the letter, but it was written days after Del. David Nutter, R-Christiansburg, and several Montgomery County officials met with Homer in Richmond.

"I think he was taken aback by the way Norfolk Southern has been handling things and the lack of information," Nutter said after the meeting.

Homer and Norfolk Southern Vice President Jim Hixon both said the state and the railroad are working together to find other sites, but the options are limited because the railroad has rejected six other locations.

There were three finalists, Norfolk Southern spokesman Robin Chapman said Tuesday.

"I cannot tell you exactly where they are," he said.

Chapman did reveal that both rejected finalists are north and east of Elliston; he called them "Site A" and "Site B." Both are already developed, so building there would drive up the project's cost. Both have problems with access and traffic. One is in a flood plain. The other is too small. One is on the wrong railroad line.

"We're not opposed to looking at other sites," Hixon said. "We're not closing our eyes if somebody else has one."

Less than three miles from the Elliston site, closer to Interstate 81 and on the rail line, is land Roanoke County's community plan marks for industrial development. Chapman wouldn't say if that site was considered.

Doug Chittum, Roanoke County's director of economic development, said no one talked to him about it.

"Which sites they looked at and which sites they weeded out for whatever reason, I haven't been privy," Chittum said. "I don't know that anyone else has."

Roanoke County Administrator Elmer Hodge said the county had "very limited involvement" with Norfolk Southern's site selection.

"We looked to see if we had a site that would fit their criteria," Hodge said, "and we just didn't have it."

Chittum said he didn't know what the railroad's criteria were beyond the general information that's been available publicly -- long, flat, near an interstate and beside a railroad.

The planned intermodal site would be part of the Heartland Corridor, which is meant to cut shipping time between Hampton Roads ports and the Midwest. The project is also supposed to reduce truck traffic by moving freight off highways and onto rail cars.

State officials have said the facility could remove 200,000 trucks from Virginia highways. Opponents have questioned how an east-west rail line would help nearby, truck-laden Interstate 81, which runs north and south.

Chapman said Tuesday that it won't.

"Its purpose is not to take truck traffic off I-81," he said.

Montgomery County Supervisor Gary Creed represents Elliston.

"We've been talking for some time about rail being the solution for interstate. This thing is not going to be the solution for the interstate," Creed said Tuesday. "It's not going to help our interstate."

Creed argued it would funnel more traffic onto the busiest section of I-81.

At a Monday night meeting, Virginia Department of Transportation officials said the increased truck traffic won't have an appreciable effect on the interstate.

VDOT has been studying plans to improve the highway for the past three years.

The Elliston site is not a done deal, Creed said. But Norfolk Southern seems determined.

"This is where they want to put it," Creed said. "And that's where they plan to put it."

Wednesday, October 11, 2006
bentley@ble.org

http://www.ble.org/pr/news/headline.asp?id=17111

© 2006 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen
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Roanoke Times article

NS hints at smaller road-to-rail facility
Norfolk Southern's plans for the Elliston site could include a new road to get trucks to I-81.
By Tim Thornton
  381-1669

Related
Map
See where the proposed intermodal facility would be located
Norfolk Southern's Elliston road-to-rail transfer facility will be less active than a lot of people thought. At least that's what Norfolk Southern officials are telling Montgomery County officials.

The facility could have less traffic than some predicted, and a new road might link the facility to Interstate 81's Ironto exit, which could limit new truck traffic on U.S. 460.

"It sounds better than what I envisioned to start with," said Supervisor Gary Creed, whose district includes the facility site and whose constituents have voiced worries about increased truck and train traffic. "Maybe that's the picture they were painting. I'm not naive enough to believe all of it."

Intermodal shipping puts goods in containers that can be transferred among trains, ships and trucks. It is meant to move goods more efficiently.

The Elliston facility is part of the federal Heartland Corridor plan, which aims to increase tunnel clearances so containers can be double-stacked on rail cars running from Columbus, Ohio, to Norfolk.

Congress appropriated almost $100 million for the corridor. More than $22 million of that is supposed to be spent in Virginia. The commonwealth will pay 70 percent of the $18 million the Elliston facility is expected to cost.

Creed said that in a conference call last week, Norfolk Southern officials said the Elliston truck-and-train yard will handle only five or six trucks a day in the early going. That could grow to 10 per day fairly quickly, but would probably never top 50 per day.

"I kind of bit their head off for a while about traffic, and then they said it really wouldn't be that much traffic," Creed said.

How that traffic will get to and from I-81 isn't settled. Early reports indicated the Dixie Caverns exit, less than three miles away in Roanoke County, would serve the facility. Now, Creed said, Norfolk Southern wants a new road that would run through the Montgomery County industrial park, which is across U.S. 460 from the proposed intermodal facility, then join North Fork Road (Virginia 603) on the way to I-81.

"There's nothing set in stone, but that's their idea," Creed said.

A new road could spur development around that interchange, which Creed said would be preferable to development nearer the proposed facility.

"There's more open land over there, and if somebody wants to develop that, they would have an easier time getting it zoned," Creed said.

Norfolk Southern has shared a map of the proposed site -- about 62 acres -- with Montgomery County, but the company hasn't said how the land acquisition is progressing, according to county spokesman Robert Parker.

The company and the county are working together on a study of the effects the facility will have on the environment and the community, Parker said.

"I'm told it'll be some time -- some number of weeks," he said. "It won't be done right away."

Creed said he told Norfolk Southern that people in the community are becoming anxious about the lack of information. He asked for a community meeting. The company agreed to have one in August, he said.

"They weren't telling us a lot, either," added Del. Dave Nutter, R-Christiansburg.

Nutter said he had another spot in his district in mind for the facility. Dublin -- with the tenantless Commerce Park, the inland port, the airport and easy access to rail lines and the interstate -- seemed like the perfect place to put it.

But after the May announcement that the facility was bound for the Roanoke area, Nutter thought his district was out of the running. He didn't talk to Montgomery County officials about the deal after that, Nutter said. He had no idea they were working on the project.

They weren't, according to Creed. Supervisors learned Norfolk Southern had picked the Elliston site shortly before the rest of the world knew, he said.

And no one outside the company seems to know how the site was chosen.

"They have been so tight-lipped," Nutter said, "that nobody knows -- at least nobody I'm aware of -- knows what their criteria were."

On Friday, Norfolk Southern spokeswoman Susan Terpay said, "At this time I can't discuss the project's location or impact."