Norfolk Southern raises the roof on ‘the Heartland Corridor’

Floodlights glared deep in a century-old tunnel under an Appalachian hillside. An excavator poked at the arched ceiling like a pterodactyl, the Hampton Roads Pilot reports. Chunks of sandstone shattered and fell thunderously into an empty rail car.

Work has gone on like
this for nearly a year. Crews begin at 2 a.m. and call it a day about noon. In
late March, they still were a few hundred feet from the south end of Norfolk
Southern’s Big Sandy 1, a 2,627-foot railroad tunnel burrowed through a hill
that sits along the Big Sandy River separating West Virginia from Kentucky.

Their task: to carve a higher
clearance in the ceiling of the tunnel, making it big enough to handle rail
cars loaded with cargo containers stacked two-high, doubling the railroad’s
capacity and giving shippers more bang for their buck. It is one of 28 tunnels
that form the centerpiece of what Norfolk Southern calls "the Heartland
Corridor," a sort of Northwest Passage for double-stack rail traffic between
Hampton Roads and the Midwest that will shave 230 miles and about a day of
transit time from existing routes. Combined with the port’s 50-foot channels
and ready access to the open sea, it’s anticipated to have a magnetic effect on
East Coast container traffic.

The taller tunnels will
make Hampton Roads "much more competitive with the other ports," said Bob
Billingsley, Norfolk Southern’s director of structural projects, who has been
overseeing the tunnel work. "That’s the only reason we’re doing it. That’s what
it’s all about."

For the past three years,
working in the wee hours to avoid disrupting rail traffic, Billingsley’s crews
have been raising the roofs on tunnels in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky,
enabling them to handle the 20-foot, 3 -inch-high container trains that have
had to go around the mountains, through Pennsylvania and Tennessee, because the
tunnels were too small. The railroad plans to start running the double-stack
trains in September.

"It’s the biggest
engineering undertaking we’ve had in the last 100 years – one of the biggest in
modern railroad history, anyway," Billingsley said.

Each of the tunnels – 23 of
them in West Virginia, four in Virginia and one in Kentucky – has presented a
unique puzzle, a slightly different configuration of rock and soil.

"I’ve learned something
almost every day," said Billingsley, who after spending most of his career
working with steel, including a stint overseeing structures at Norfolk Southern’s
Pier 6 coal-loading facility, suddenly found himself a student of mineralogy
and geology.

The tunnels, built around
1905, have stood at 19.5 feet from track to ceiling. They need to be an average
of 1.5 feet taller, including a 9-inch cushion, to accommodate the double-stack
trains.

In five tunnels, the
answer was simple: lower the track bed. In five others, the crew cut "notches"
where the walls met the ceilings, allowing enough room for the corners of the
containers. In one case, a bypass was built to skip the tunnel altogether; in
another, the tunnel requires more extensive work.

In Big Sandy 1, as in 15
other tunnels, it meant taking out "the whole crown of the tunnel, from about 9
to 3 on a clock," Billingsley said. Work in this tunnel began with the boring
of hundreds of investigatory holes into the overhead liner, removing core
samples and inserting a tiny camera that took photos of the rock and soil
superstructure to assess its condition.

The excavator then went
to work, pecking out the curved tunnel roof, chunks at a time. A series of
13.5-foot supporting "rock bolts" were drilled into the exposed new "roof"
before it was sprayed with quickset concrete from a miniature concrete-plant-on-rails.

The work has been tough,
tedious and dangerous. On Oct. 22, a crewman working on Big Sandy 3, another
tunnel a few miles away, was killed, buried under more than 100 tons of rock
that fell on the excavator he operated. It has been the only fatality since the
project began.

Progress in Big Sandy 1
means clearing anywhere from 15 to 30 feet – on a good day. Every day they must
clear the tracks before the coal and freight trains resume running, which
explains the early hours. The crew generally hits the sack when most people are
having dinner, if not earlier.

"The hardest part of it
has been fighting the night shift," said Michael Parham, 29, a civil engineer
from Tennessee who helped gather video and geo-technical data from the tunnel
ceilings. "From 2 a.m. until the sun comes up, you’re just fighting to
stay awake."

While the tunnel work is
the heart of the Heartland Corridor, there are two other components – one in
Hampton Roads, another in Columbus, Ohio – all financed through a public-private
partnership drawing on federal, state and railroad funds.

The local link involved
relocating Commonwealth Railway’s line that connects Suffolk to APM Terminals
in Portsmouth – and, eventually, Craney Island, where the port plans to build a
fourth state cargo terminal. The line is being shifted from populated areas of
Churchland and Western Branch to the medians of Interstate 664 and Va. 164.

The Ohio piece involved
building a rail facility in Columbus – the Rickenbacker Intermodal Terminal –
to handle cargo containers that can move interchangeably by rail, truck or
ship.

The tunnel clearance cost
about $190 million, while the rail relocation and Ohio terminal reached about
$123 million. Federal and state funding has covered about $183 million of the
$313 million, according to port documents and Norfolk Southern officials.

The idea of linking the
three projects together evolved gradually, driven in part by the realization
that, at the beginning, nobody was thinking big enough, said Robert Martinez,
Norfolk Southern’s vice president for business development and a former
Virginia transportation secretary.

"We weren’t asking for
enough money," Martinez said. "We weren’t being noticed."

It wasn’t until a
Washington lobbyist met with Norfolk Southern executives about five years ago
to discuss the APM/Craney rail relocation project that the big picture began to
emerge, Martinez said. The lobbyist advised them that the reason the tunnel
project wasn’t getting congressional funding support was because the railroad
wasn’t seeking enough money. He suggested combining the projects and working
together to get funding. A single project soon emerged.

"We came up with the name
‘Heartland Corridor’ to brand the entire route," Martinez said.

As the Heartland Corridor
project came together, a series of events in the global shipping industry
dovetailed with it. Labor strife and congestion had been frustrating shippers
into West Coast ports, prompting them to look for ways to diversify their
transit options, including using East Coast ports.

Plans were announced for
an expansion of the Panama Canal, to be completed in 2014, which will allow
larger vessels to work the "all-water" route from Asia to ports such as Hampton
Roads.

"What the Heartland
Corridor will do is it will alter the strategic position of this port relative
to its competition," Martinez said.

Industry experts agree
the project is a positive development for the port but aren’t so sure it will
change Hampton Roads’ competitive position with ports such as New York/New Jersey.

"Is it a game-changer in
the competition between the ports? No," said Thomas Finkbiner, who headed up
Norfolk Southern’s intermodal operations during the 1990s and now is senior
chairman of the Intermodal Transportation Institute’s board of directors at the
University of Denver.

"I don’t devalue the fact
that it is a very big thing for the port of Norfolk, for Norfolk Southern and
for taking freight off the highway," Finkbiner said. However, "there are bigger
things in the supply chain" that dictate where cargo goes.

Representatives of two
shipping lines said it’s the shippers themselves – major importers such as
Target, Wal-Mart and Home Depot – that decide how and where to route their
cargo through U.S. ports.

It takes about 18 days to
get goods from Hong Kong to Columbus, Ohio, via West Coast ports, said William
Weng, director of intermodal shipping for Shanghai-based China Shipping. Going
through the Panama Canal to Norfolk and using the Heartland Corridor will take
about a week longer, yet costs about $500 less per container, Weng said.

Yet the Heartland
Corridor’s improved link between two of the biggest transportation nodes in the
nation – Hampton Roads and Columbus, Ohio – will give the port an edge as
shippers continue to grow their mix of routing options, he said.

Before Norfolk can get
there, the tunnel work must be done. And finishing the job means dealing with
the unexpected. In Big Sandy 4, one of the last of the tunnels to be completed
by early August , workers discovered an underground spring seeping five gallons
of water a minute.

"You never know what you’re
going to find, so you got to deal with it as it comes," Billingsley said.

The soil is so unstable
above Big Sandy 4 that crews are constructing a new tunnel in the last 100 feet
of the old tunnel, inserting a steel-and- concrete canopy.

Still, Billingsley said,
the biggest challenge has been operating within a tight 2 a.m.-to-noon window
that allows two Norfolk Southern trains hauling time-sensitive freight for the
United Parcel Service to stay on schedule.

Even though the project
is about speeding such freight through the mountains, progress is measured in
feet.

"You get in a pattern or
routine," Billingsley said, "You can’t be in a hurry."