Norfolk Southern considering Rappahannock line

Looking for a shorter route between Culpeper and Front Royal, the Norfolk Southern Railway Company is considering the possibility of building the first railroad ever to pass through Rappahannock County.

County Administrator John McCarthy said he heard about the idea during one of his recent trips to Richmond and put the issue on the agenda for Monday's meeting of the Board of Supervisors.

McCarthy said he heard from a friend at the Virginia Department of Transportation that VDOT is looking at a freight rail line through Rappahannock as one way to reduce truck traffic on Interstate 81. He also said it is rumored that the line would include a tunnel that would pass for four miles beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains south of Front Royal.

Front Royal is a major rail center because the Virginia Inland Port is located there at the intersection of U.S. Routes 340 and 522. The Inland Port is a transfer facility between trucks and rail for containers going to and from the Hampton Roads area.

Norfolk Southern spokesman Robin Chapman said the line could potentially provide the company with smoother operations and more capacity to carry freight in the region.

"What it would do is shorten the distance between Culpeper and Front Royal on the line that comes from the south," Chapman said. "Currently, we have to go to Manassas and west to Front Royal."

Virginia is part of Norfolk Southern's Crescent Corridor between New York and New Orleans, Chapman said. The line between Manassas and Front Royal is a "choke point" in that corridor.

Passenger trains operated by Virginia Railway Express and other freight trains heading to and from Washington, D.C., cause congestion in the Manassas area, Chapman said. A line through Rappahannock would allow Norfolk Southern to avoid that bottleneck.

"We're doing a study to look at the feasibility of it," Chapman said. "It's a theoretical exercise at this point."

The study is scheduled to be completed in the spring, he said.

Chapman neither confirmed nor denied the rumor that a four-mile tunnel would be part of a Rappahannock line. "At this point it's too early to say what configuration that route would take," he said.

The commonwealth has also taken an interest in the line, Chapman said, because it could eliminate some truck traffic on the region's highways.

For the past year, conservationists in Rappahannock have been fighting Dominion Virginia Power's proposed 500,000-volt expansion of an electric transmission corridor that passes through the county. Norfolk Southern's new rail line, if it goes forward, will not likely be welcomed any more than the additional power lines.

Monica Worth, president of the Rappahannock League for Environmental Protection, said RLEP will oppose the rail line.

"We don't want to see that kind of taking of land in Rappahannock County," Worth said. "RLEP will be looking into the best strategies and trying to advise county landowners what we think would be in their best interests to consider.

"Taking trucks off the road and putting them onto rail is something that is usually favored by the environmental community, but this presents an enormous problem and will have to be weighed in its context," Worth said.

Phil Irwin, a Flint Hill resident and founder of RLEP, is a member of a citizens group called Rail Solution, which promotes railroads as a more efficient way to transport freight along the I-81 corridor. He has been following the issue for several years and introduced RLEP to it last week.

Irwin sees a potential Rappahannock rail line as a "very long-range threat." But it is being talked about, he said, so RLEP will continue to monitor any developments.

Eminent domain, though it is not favored, is one tool Norfolk Southern could use to purchase the land they would need for a new rail line, Chapman said.

"If we decided we wanted to do this, we would engineer a route and then begin acquiring the property on which to build the tracks," he said. "Railroads do have eminent domain authority, but that is an option we consider extreme and would like to avoid. We much prefer doing direct negotiations with property owners."

Norfolk Southern is one of the largest railroad companies in the United States. According to the company's Web site, it owns nearly 38,000 miles of track in 22 states in the eastern U.S. as well as the District of Columbia and Ontario, Canada.

E-mail the reporter at kallen@timespapers.com.