Five States Seek $300 Million Federal Grant for Intermodal Development on East Coast

This story appears in the Nov. 9 print edition of Transport Topics.

Five states have formed a coalition to seek a $300 million federal grant to help pay for intermodal development and improvements along the Norfolk Southern Railroad corridor that stretches from New Orleans to New York City.

With new and upgraded intermodal terminals, the project will reduce truck traffic and emissions, the governors of the five states said in a letter accompanying the grant request to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

When fully developed, the corridor annually will “divert more than 1.3 million commercial longhaul trucks off our congested interstates” and “reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.9 million tons and save 169 million gallons of fuel,” the governors said in their letter.

The states in the coalition are Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia.

The federal grants from the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program are part of the federal stimulus law passed earlier this year.

LaHood has promised, according to a DOT press release, that the recipients will be announced in January. The state coalition is competing with 1,380 other applications, DOT said.

In their letter to LaHood, the governors called intermodal transportation an underused component of the overall transportation system that could leverage “inherent strengths and efficiencies of both longhaul rail and shorthaul truck movements.”

Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer told a gathering of transportation experts last month that the intermodal corridor project could reduce truck traffic by as much as 15% on Interstate 81, The Associated Press reported.

The interstate runs through Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York state. The Norfolk Southern line, known as the Crescent Corridor, runs though all five states in the coalition.

Erin Waters, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, recently told Transport Topics, “Once it’s fully operational, we anticipate that the corridor could divert 690,000 longhaul trucks to rail [in Pennsylvania].”

Trucking industry leaders ex-pressed skepticism, however, about the estimated reductions in truck traffic.

“I doubt seriously they would take that many off,” said James Runk, president of the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association.

Local and regional carriers would benefit from intermodal projects that promote economic development, Runk said, but the freight business is driven by the needs of shippers and consumers.

“You still have to have vehicles to bring the product to and from the railheads all along the corridor,” he said, “and you also, too, have the timing [issue]. Are [railroads] committed to be able to move product at a reasonable price as quickly and as safely, as efficiently as we can?”

Dale Bennett, executive vice president of the Virginia Trucking Association, voiced similar concerns, saying he doubted truck traffic could be substantially reduced.

“Unfortunately, there seem to be a whole lot of people in Virginia that think we can just solve all of our traffic problems by taking all the trucks and putting them on rail,” Bennett said.

He agreed with Runk, however, that some trucking firm executives believe improving intermodal facilities will produce more business for them.

The Crescent Corridor Intermodal Freight Program is expected to cost $2.5 billion. Virginia and Pennsylvania together al-ready have dedicated more than $100 million of their own funds to upgrading their rail corridors and intermodal facilities.

The project includes everything from building new terminals to installing new signals and raising overpasses to accommodate containers double-stacked on railcars, said Rudy Husband, spokesman for Norfolk Southern, which also is investing heavily in the corridor project.

The railroad is building a new intermodal terminal in Greencastle, Pa., near the Maryland state line, just off Interstate 81.

Likewise, the railroad is building a new terminal near Memphis, Tenn. If the coalition receives

the $300 million TIGER grant, $81.2 million of the money would help pay for the terminal, said Julie Oaks, public information officer for the Tennessee Department of Transportation.

“If the TIGER grant application is not successful,” Oaks said, Norfolk Southern “indicates they will still build the facility, but the development timeline will be longer.”

The Crescent Corridor project is not the only one in which the states and the railroad are investing. Intermodal improvements and track upgrades are also in progress in a second corridor known as the Heartland (click here for previous story).

The Heartland Corridor runs from the port of Hampton Roads located in Norfolk, Va., through West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana to Chicago.