Talk:Norfolk Southern

Under review:

Proposed Keystone Terminal
The Keystone Coal Terminal at the Port of Jacksonville, Florida is currently planned for development by the Keystone Coal Company, a unit of Keystone Industries LLC. The terminal is slated to open in 2011, and could open markets in the southeastern and midwestern U.S. to Colombian coal. Use of Keystone Coal Co.’s $20 million terminal is expected to create access to imported coal that is 10 to 20 percent cheaper than domestic coal.

The project is proposed to include a rail loop which connects to the existing Norfolk Southern Corporation line, which runs to a CSX line and Florida East Coast Railway, a short-line running from Jacksonville to Miami.

(from section on transporting flying ash)

Another opportunity may emerge in Chesapeake, where a golf course was built with 1.5 million tons of fly ash from the Chesapeake Energy Center Bottom Ash / Sedimentation Pond. At a March 16, 2011 public meeting, Chesapeake released the results of a $400,000 groundwater study of the golf course site. It showed that 10 substances – including ammonia, manganese and sulfate – “were detected at higher levels in shallow on-site groundwater relative to the surrounding baseline levels,” according to a city spokeswoman’s email. The developer of Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville approached the railroad about the possibility of removing the fly ash and transporting it to a landfill or reclamation site.

The golf course developer, Neil Wallace of CPM Virginia, estimated it would cost between $60 million and $80 million to dig up the golf course, carry away the fly ash and bring in new soil to rebuild the course. The railroad was serious enough about the possible removal of the fly ash to produce a 25-page PowerPoint presentation for Wallace titled “Battlefield Golf Club Site Remediation Project.” Norfolk Southern officials said their pitch about the Chesapeake site is part of a broader company effort to pursue what they view as a business ripe for expansion - namely, transporting fly ash.

The PowerPoint prepared for Wallace is branded with the company’s “Waste Solutions” logo, Plain said, along with the slogan “Your Norfolk Southern Solution for Waste Transportation.” In quarterly earnings calls with analysts, railroad officials pointed to the positive impact the TVA project was having on Norfolk Southern’s chemicals business, even amid the economic downturn of the past couple of years. “Chemicals year-over-year comparisons are expected to improve, driven by project growth such as the newly contracted unit train fly ash business moving from Tennessee to Alabama for disposal,” said Don Seale, Norfolk Southern’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, during an Oct. 27, 2009, teleconference. Though the TVA business is done, the railroad said it has a number of waste-transportation projects under way and has assigned a team to work specifically on such deals.