Choo-choo times two equals double trouble
The most important stretch in Norfolk Southern’s vast rail system is the one between northern New Jersey and Chicago, and the only part of it where double-stacked freight trains and oil trains cannot rumble along the same corridor is the Pittsburgh Line.
The railroad is fixing to change that, to allow double-stacked trains on the same route that tanker cars take through some of the most densely populated parts of our city.
You might say that Norfolk Southern wants this rerouting in the worst way. You’d almost certainly say that if you were one of about 50 people attending a PowerPoint presentation by Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh on Monday night.
The meeting was in a commercial building not more than a Clemente throw from a city-owned bridge at the corner of Brighton Road and West North Avenue. The bridge crosses over four lines of railroad tracks. Doublestacked trains can’t currently squeeze under it; somewhere around Braddock, Norfolk Southern’s taller westbound freights switch to the Mon Line and stay on the southern side of that river through the South Side.
The railroad would like the North Side bridges heightened so the choo-choos might scoot under them. It would save a little time. That would make the railroad a lot of money.
Folks at this meeting, though, couldn’t help but recall that a double-stacked
train derailed on the South Side Aug. 5, dangling cars on the hillside and shutting down the Station Square light-rail stop for 20 days. Some North Siders are downright scared at the thought of double-stacked trains running alongside the long lines of tanker cars that travel through the neighborhood daily.
The Port Authority also has “significant concerns’’ about double-stacked cars running alongside the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway for most of its 9.1 miles from Rankin to Downtown. (Tanker cars have run beside the busway since it opened in 1983.) Any switch from the Mon Line to the Pittsburgh Line would take double-stacked trains from Braddock through Edgewood, Wilkinsburg and the city’s East End before eventually crossing the Allegheny River near the David L. Lawrence Convention Center to head through the North Side and points beyond.
The organization that calls itself RP3 — and has been essentially just Glenn Olcerst, a retired labor lawyer, and his wife Barb Talerico, a retired information technology professional — have spread words of warning in Regent Square, Squirrel Hill and Wilkinsburg in the past several weeks.
Rudy Husband, spokesman for Norfolk Southern, said that what’s feared here is commonplace elsewhere. The railroad runs double-stacked trains and others pulling tanker cars along the same corridor through northern New Jersey, Allentown, Harrisburg, Cleveland, Toledo and Chicago, he said.
“The only place right now where double-stacked trains and [hazardous materials] trains are not running in the same corridor is basically within our clearance project’’ through Pittsburgh, he said.
But there are issues beyond, or rather above, what might roll on the tracks. Raising the North Avenue/Brighton Road bridge any higher could mean lessening motorists’ sight distances at a major intersection where seeing what’s coming the other way is already less than ideal. PennDOT is looking at that. And the Breathe Project has suggested health risks from more diesel emissions if traffic on the Pittsburgh Line is able to double.
Railroaders point out that a
single double-stacked train can move the same cargo as a couple of hundred trucks so the trains actually decrease pollution. And, “from a volume and revenue standpoint,’’ Mr. Husband said, the line through Pittsburgh is “the most important line in the Norfolk Southern system.’’ It’s costing money to switch to the South Side and then cross the Ohio River to the North Side downriver at Brunot Island.
Nobody doubts this project’s importance to the railroad. It’s also true that trains have been traveling the Pittsburgh Line, in various incarnations, since not long after Allegheny City gave the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Rail Road the right of way in 1857. It’s also longtime state policy to have 22-foot clearances on all new railroad overpasses, to help the Port of Philadelphia get more import-export traffic.
But what’s tough for Pennsylvania taxpayers living in Pittsburgh to wrap their heads around is our giving the railroad a $20 million PennDOT grant so it might remake a city-owned bridge in a way we never sought, to change the streets and the sidewalks to something nobody using them would ever design, in order for Norfolk Southern to make much more money.
Pardon me, boy, why do we have to gift this choo-choo?