NS Opens Heartland Corridor for Intermodal

After three years of enlarging Appalachian Mountain tunnels, Norfolk Southern Railway opened its Heartland Corridor to double-stack operations Thursday between Virginia's seaport area and big Midwest hubs at Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago.

The costly project, with a construction tab of more than $300 million split between the railroad and federal or state partners, converts a route dominated by coal and merchandise trains - plus one-high container trains - into the shortest and fastest route NS has for double-stack intermodal service between the mid-Atlantic region and the Midwest.

"This is a remarkable achievement, and it marks a notable date in transportation history," said Charles W. Moorman, the railroad company's chairman, president and CEO.

It is also the first of three major double-stack corridors being developed in the eastern U.S., to be followed within a few years by the Crescent Corridor NS will use from the Mississippi Delta up to New York, and rival CSX Transportation's National Gateway that will combine a north-south route paralleling part of Interstate 95 with an east-west route from Baltimore into western Ohio.

NS said it held an opening ceremony at its recently enlarged Cowan Tunnel near Radford, in western Virginia, where an intermodal train hauling 148 double-stacked containers moved through the 3,302-foot tunnel on its way to the Midwest. In all, NS had to enlarge 28 of its mountain tunnels and clear 24 other obstructions.

NS officials have said most intermodal boxes moving on this corridor will be ocean containers, rather than the larger domestic containers and trailers, so its marketing is aimed at ocean ship lines wanting to use eastern ports to reach Midwest customers.

The new route through Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio saves at least 230 miles and up to two days compared with other stack routes NS previously used between Norfolk, Va., and Chicago. Up to now it has sent double-stack trains daily north to Harrisburg, Pa., before heading west toward Columbus and then to Chicago, or it used a longer route that first moved south to Knoxville, Tenn., before turning northward to Chicago.

-- Contact John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com.