In the roulette of Baltimore area transportation played by Governor Hogan and MDOT Secretary Rahn who refused ("boondoggle" for the Baltimore Red Line)), endorsed ("transformative" for Maglev) and trivialized ("Utility" for the Hyperloop) the various transportation tunnels at will, the officials finally found their match in the CSX CEO who suddenly and unexpectedly took his Howard Street tunnel out of the game.
The Baltimore Brew wrote an excellent and quite entertaining piece about CSX's withdrawal from the enlargement of the Howard Street tunnel to make it fit for trains loaded with double stacked shipping containers instead of only single containers today.
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| Derailed: Howard Street tunnel enlargement. The image of the 2001 derailment shows the size of the tunnel in relation to a modern boxcar |
The Brew's Mark Reutter nicely deflated Hogan's CSX tunnel narrative and his side of the story by rightly pointing out that Hogan's approach would have been unlikely to succeed in Washington, after the first denial of funding by the feds last year. Ask again, just for more would likely not be a winning strategy, no matter how dysfunctional Washington and how uncertain federal transportation funding is in general.
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| Howard Street Tunnel (SUN graphic) |
But in his eagerness to poke a hole in Hogan's bubble and contrast a good "hardnosed railroadman" with the pipe dreams of Elon Musk (Hyperloop) and the Japanese Maglev consortium, Reutter gave CSX boss Hunter Harrison a wide berth. He went as far as excusing the man's withdrawal from a project that would fix his own tunnel to his company's benefit by saying "Harrison was within his rights to insist CSX needn't to pay anything, or not much of anything". That is an unusual position for the Brew, otherwise always critical about big corporations. It is also one that isn't justified when it comes to the Howard Street tunnel.
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| Howard Street tunnel section from project application |
Reutter also poo-pooed the tunnel project itself as engineering-wise challenged.
the Howard Street project was a long shot from the get-go, a nice-sounding venture with serious engineering challenges given the age of the tunnel and the buried infrastructure of water pipes, sewer mains and electrical conduits around it. (Brew).Unless Reuter knows something that the engineers ready to begin an abbreviated environmental impact statement on the project don't know, the manner in which the 122 year old tunnel was supposed to be made fit for double-stacking was really surprisingly simple. There was little structural rebuilding required in the suggested concept. The tunnel which once upon a time was designed for two tracks is wide enough for modern trains and just needed between 12-18" more height. The fix was suggested as in part lowering the tracks and occasionally heightening the ceiling. Because it seemed pretty straight forward, the suggested cost of $425 million seemed outright quaint when compared to the costs associated with previous alternatives. The tunnel has been heightened before in 1985. At points storm drain culverts traverse the tunnel below the tracks, a fact that was cited as a contributing factor in the 2001 derailment and fire which resulted in the shut down of parts of downtown for several days.
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| Maersk containership in the port |
If the Port of Baltimore and actually, the entire mid and north Atlantic region could be freed from one of the last rail delivery bottlenecks with such a small amount, it sure would be a good investment. (The project would include the 1.7 mile Howard Street tunnel as well as various short tunnels under bridges in Baltimore at Mt Royal Ave, North Ave, Sisson Street, Huntington Ave, Charles and St Paul Streets, Barclay and Guilford Avenue, Greenmount Avenue and Harford Road).
Surprising, many who already had already conceded dominance in container shipping to Norfolk, the Port of Baltimore handled nearly 908,000 20-foot-equivalent units of containers between June 2016 and 17, according to the Maryland Port Administration, an increase in shipping containers in addition to a record 10.3 million tons of general freight (bulk goods) for which the port has carved itself a niche, especially as a destination for imported cars.
The Brew pokes fun of all the "caterwauling" about the CSX withdrawal, but doesn't really address the reality that the port is, indeed, important for this region and that doublestack railroad connections are key to bringing containers from and to the ships effectively and for efficient freight railroading up and down the coast.
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| Double stacked containers on train cars |
While it may be true that Hogan and his MDOT Secretary were "daydreaming" if they thought they could get much federal FASTLANE money for the project, and apparently also failed to discuss the matter with the new CSX CEO, who got his job in March of this year, the actual problem still remains on the table. CSX' intransigence on its own tunnel is what really deserves the criticism, especially since Harrison's reasons and justifications for his step sound really flimsy.
“Since March, CSX has been adopting a new, and significantly different, operating plan called Precision Scheduled Railroading. The overall objective of this new operating plan is to drive better performance, which results in a superior service product for our customers and safer, more efficient operations.
Given the operating changes that CSX’s new leadership team has made over the [past] several months, and upon an updated evaluation, we determined that the Howard Street Tunnel project proposal no longer justifies the level of investment required from CSX and our public partners at this time.
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| Map of the double stack rail obstructions between north and south |
Nobody seems to be able to tell how such a move would benefit CSX in the long run, or anybody else, for that matter, except truckers and maybe railroad competitor Norfolk Southern. It seems that CSX's new CEO is playing a game to which Hogan and Rahn haven't quite caught up.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
CSX collapses Howard Street improvement project
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