An excavator chips away at the ceiling of a tunnel, one of 28 along “the Heartland Corridor” in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. Norfolk Southern plans to start double-stack rail traffic in September 2010. Photo credit:  David B. Hollingsworth, The Virginian-Pilot

In late March (after nearly a year of work), excavators 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 Heartland Corridor Route; click on graphic from The Virginian-Pilot above for larger view.

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. 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.

It’s the end of the day for this worker at Big Sandy 4 in West Virginia. “From 2 a.m. until the sun comes up, you’re just fighting to stay awake,” says Michael Parham, 29, a civil engineer from Tennessee. Photo credit: David B. Hollingsworth, The Virginian-Pilot

A series of 13.5-foot supporting “rock bolts” were drilled into the exposed new “roof” before it was sprayed with quick-set concrete from a miniature concrete-plant-on-rails. The work has been tough, tedious and dangerous.

Every day they must clear the tracks before the coal and freight trains resume running, which explains the early hours.

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 Virginia’s State Route 164.

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; and
• 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.

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.

Shippers themselves – major importers such as Target, Wal-Mart and Home Depot – decide how and where to route their cargo through U.S. ports.

Shipping lines present importers with a menu of options that can include going through West Coast ports and railing goods to Chicago – which for Asian cargo offers the fastest transit time – or going the all-water route through the Panama Canal to East Coast ports for distribution by rail and truck. The Heartland Corridor will put another option on the table. Key factors in the decision are typically focused on transit time, price and, increasingly, “carbon footprint.”

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.

The decision comes down to time-sensitivity versus cost, he said. Goods such as computers, TVs, video games and some garments such as dresses are more time-sensitive, Weng said. Furniture, toys and household tools are not and would be candidates for the longer, cheaper route.

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.

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 5 gallons of water a minute.

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.

Excerpts from an article by Robert McCabe, The Virginian-Pilot