Train of thoughts

Infrastructure, the actual kind

MANY ARKANSANS walking through a rural wooded area can imagine the scene: It’s some sort of hunting season, perhaps you’ve got a dog at your side. The leaves crack under your boots. It’s a pretty day, with geese honking overhead and squirrels scurrying in the trees.

And you happen upon a highway— that is, a high way—in the middle of nowhere and notice what looks like an old rail bed. And wonder how long it’s been since the tracks were pulled up.

When considering the expansion of America, one of the things that has always awed us is how quickly railroads were put down. In the 1800s, the country raced westward, as private companies competed to get the first rail line to the Pacific. And we can imagine how people felt on their first train ride—minus the bumps and hiccups that come with saddles and horses. Just a sweet glide across the land, no bellyache from a jostle.

To this day, rail remains a solid chunk of the county’s infrastructure, even if people have mostly chosen other types for transportation. Freight rail, for its part, is a nearly $80-billion industry that provides more than 167,000 jobs. The Federal Railroad Administration says the private organizations that own freight railways spend nearly $25 billion each year to maintain and add capacity to their systems.

And in the northwest corner of this state, rail might be getting a second look.

The papers say a rail line once ran from Siloam Springs to Rogers via Highfill, which is now home to a sleek and speedy national airport. While the rails were ripped up in 1918, the old rail bed is still there, in parts, waiting to be used again.

“The 10-mile line is still shown on the Arkansas State Rail Plan, even though the easements have long since lapsed,” the papers say. “That means the rail could be used again to run a spur to the vicinity of the Northwest Arkansas National Airport (XNA) from the Kansas City Southern tracks in western Benton County.”

That’s not a bad idea. The line used to serve apple-growing communities, moving fruit from orchards to market, back when Washington and Benton counties were the two largest apple-producing counties in the United States. (There’s a neat fact to impress friends at your next tailgate party.)

Northwest Arkansas is already growing like a weed. XNA is adding flights each year. Keeping infrastructure options open makes perfect sense.

WHEN MOST folks in that corner of the state think of rail, they might picture the tour line from Arkansas and Missouri Railroad that runs between Springdale, Winslow and Van Buren. It’s a pretty option for viewing foliage and other scenery in the Ozark Mountains.

But consider this stretch of rail line in Benton County is located next to the airport and the Interstate 49 corridor. Now you’ve got a perfect opportunity for an investment in an industrial plant or manufacturing facility. And the region isn’t likely to turn that down, because that hypothetical facility will likely mean well-paying jobs with decent benefits.

Although XNA is a perfect resource for any corporation looking to put a facility in that stretch of Benton County (parts, supplies, executives, and more can be flown in and out), the airport itself, while enthusiastically encouraging such a project, wouldn’t be directly involved. The Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t typically allow the airport to spend money off airport land, officials say.

Andrew Branch, chief development officer at XNA, added, “One of our responsibilities with the FAA is to try to ensure compatible land use around the airport, and the FAA generally doesn’t want houses, residential, to be built really close to an airport because it’s just dangerous, and it’s loud.”

So if some enterprising company does want to come in and revive this rail line, what’s the cost? Apparently a 2006 Air Cargo Study and Freight Transportation Access Assessment (say that three times fast) estimates it would probably cost between $10 million and $12 million to extend rail service to the airport on the old rail bed.

And Mr. Branch said if easements were all returned to property owners after the railroad tracks were torn up, someone would have to go through and buy all that land again.

Where does that money come from? Headlines out of Washington seem to indicate a bipartisan infrastructure deal was reached last week. And rail qualifies as hard infrastructure, something all parties can get onboard with.

THE NEW YORK Times reports this bipartisan infrastructure bill has around $66 billion for passenger and freight rail. Perhaps the millions of dollars it would take to breathe new life into this rail line and connect it to the airport could come from that giant pile of borrowed cash. If Democrats and Republicans are dead set on spending a trillion dollars for infrastructure, northwest Arkansas might as well look to upgrade its rail.

During the 2020 fiscal year, Amtrak said customers made nearly 46,200 trips on Amtrak trains on an average day. During that same year, Amtrak customers took 16.8 million trips, the company said.

Getting back to freight, to keep this rail line viable for future investment interests, the Northwest Arkansas Council and surrounding towns like Highfill, Centerton and Bentonville should make it known there’s an economic opportunity just waiting for someone to seize it.

The old rail line may have been used for apples, but the future can be shaped for anything else.