The head of Norfolk Southern Railway used remarks to the National Governors Association to promote multi-state NS intermodal corridor programs as a way for states to help fight highway congestion and create "green" jobs, the Journal of Commerce reported.
Charles W. Moorman, the chairman, president and CEO of Norfolk, Va.-based NS, told governors July 18 at their NGA meeting in Biloxi, Miss., the Heartland and Crescent corridors NS is developing are examples of public-private funding plans that "can create additional capacity in our rail transportation network, with public benefits of jobs creation, less highway congestion, lower environmental emissions and fuel savings."
NS with considerable federal and state funding is creating a double-stack intermodal route from the Norfolk area to Columbus, Ohio, that slants across West Virginia along an older route that ran through mountain tunnels with low height clearances.
The new route, slated for completion next year, is opening some of those tunnels and enlarging others, and when finished will cut about a day off today's routes that must run farther north or south on the NS system to reach tracks headed to Columbus.
The Crescent Corridor is so far largely a planned program, which would run from New Orleans and Memphis at the southern end to New York in the Northeast. NS is already picking sites for intermodal hubs along the route, and has built some sidings in northwest Virginia, but is still trying to line up state and federal funding for a lot of the construction it would take to make the route into a higher-speed, doubletrack corridor.
Moorman told the NGA the Crescent Corridor project would produce 41,000 green jobs over the next decade, and move more than a million truckloads annually off the highways onto rail. It would save over 150 million gallons of fuel a year and cut carbon emissions by nearly two million tons annually, NS says.
Although freight traffic has been weak for years and is down sharply with the plunge in business that followed last September's financial crash, Moorman said traffic projections are for freight volume to grow 88 percent by 2035 and produce more congestion.
"To handle that freight, we must improve our national transportation infrastructure," he said.
(The preceding article by John D. Boyd appeared on the Web site www.joc.com on July 20, 2009.)
