THE EAST COAST MAIN LINE. Word reaches Cold Spring Shops of a plan to build a North American style high-speed railroad.

CSX, the transportation giant that was formed from the Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, Western Maryland, Louisville & Nashville, Seaboard Coast Line Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac and others, is proposing a 1,200 mile Miami-Washington super corridor that would greatly expand shipping and passenger rail capacity and, for the first time in the history of American railroads, eliminate 100% of at-grade crossings along the route, Trains Magazine reported this past week.

Driven in part by a US Department of Transportation program for interstate corridor development, the project would permit passenger train operations at 110 miles per hour and freight operations at 50-70, reports the magazine, both of which represent order-of-magnitude improvements over current practices.

I would hope the infrastructure would permit faster operation of intermodal trains such as the Tropicana specials (expedited fruit trains did not go away with the steam locomotive.)

If CSX is selected, it has a plan for turning its Washington-Miami line into a corridor of the future, according to Steve Dunham, chairman of the board of directors of the Virginia Association of Railway Patrons.

“CSX would complete a third track between Washington and Richmond, except where major, expensive projects are needed in Ashland Va., where two tracks run down the middle of the main street; Fredericksburg, Va., with its crossing of the Rappahannock River and elevated track above four streets; and the bridges over Aquia Creek and the Potomac River. The second step would be to tackle those bigger, more expensive projects,” reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

“The third step would be to build the additional track between Washington and Miami and to close or create alternatives for the 1,700 grade crossings. “The D.C. to Richmond Third Track Feasibility Study provides the path for completion” of the project north of Richmond, Jay Westbrook, CSX assistant vice president for public-private partnerships, said. The study calls for completing the capacity-expansion projects funded in 2000. The last piece of that group of improvements is to construct about seven more miles of third track north of Springfield and just south of the Potomac River.

A third track is often sufficient for North American style rail capacity enlargements, as bidirectional centralized traffic control and predictable directional peaks, particularly in commuter territory, turn the railroad into two-tracks-in-the-peak-direction, one track against the flow. (On the other hand, Union Pacific would use the third track for parking more freight trains.) The proposal calls for some public money to upgrade the railroad, something that policymakers are more receptive to as they come to understand that the highway network cannot handle anticipated increases in freight traffic. Public money is already being used to replace a second main track on the Southern Railway line (now Norfolk Southern) between Greensboro and High Point in North Carolina, to expedite passage of the Crescent, Carolinian, and Piedmont. The upgrade to the CSX represents an improvement on the old high-speed Atlantic Coast Line mainline from Richmond to Florida. The downsizing Southern and Seaboard Coast Line engaged in in the early 1970s might have made sense as short-term policies, but their long-run consequences could prove to be expensive.