CSX Touts Headway on Gateway Corridor Work

CSX Transportation said it has completed nearly a third of federally aided track clearance projects so that doublestack container trains can move between its new intermodal hub in northwest Ohio and a smaller facility at Chambersburg, Pa.

That is the first phase of the railroad’s National Gateway corridor plan, which CSX says will eventually bring stack train service on the east-west route from the Baltimore seaport to that new intermodal hub at North Baltimore, Ohio, near Toledo. The corridor will also run north-south from Baltimore into North Carolina along the Eastern Seaboard.

CSX wants to raise vertical clearances at 61 sites by 2015, so that its network will be ready to broadly offer stack train efficiencies by the time larger Panama Canal locks permit ships to reach the East Coast carrying many more containers than now. The corridor projects, once complete, can also help CSX compete for more truck-hauled domestic loads, but it mainly targets international shipments in its Gateway plans.

The Department of Transportation in February 2010 awarded CSX $98 million in a stimulus grant, to help cover costs of $183 million in first-phase National Gateway clearance work in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland. The projects include modifying or replacing rail bridges, removing some old walkways over tracks and carving new dimensions into mountain tunnels.

CSX said it has finished work at five sites and is now working on 15 more. It is replacing bridges in Kent and Ravenna, Ohio, and Paw Paw, W. Va.

-- Contact John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com. Follow him on Twitter www.twitter.com/jboydjoc