Norfolk selects Memphis area site for terminal

07/28/2009

By Candy McCampbell

Norfolk Southern Railway announced the selection of Rossville, Tenn., east of Memphis for a $129 million intermodal terminal to transfer freight between rail cars and trucks.

The terminal, on a 570-acre site in Fayette County, is scheduled for opening in January 2012.

It is part of the railway’s 2,500-mi “Crescent Corridor” that links the Gulf Coast, Birmingham and Memphis with the Philadelphia and New York markets.

The terminal is planned to handle more than 327,000 freight containers and trailers each year and will include a paved parking area big enough for almost 2,200 trailers and chassis-mounted containers.

It will create 429 jobs, 139 in the yard and 290 driving trucks, the company says.

“Because of its strategic location and growing intermodal demands in the South, the Memphis regional terminal will be an anchor for the Crescent Corridor, and the new facility will help make possible truck-competitive freight transportation between the South and major northeast markets,” Wick Moorman, Norfolk Southern CEO, says in a statement.

The terminal will join the company’s existing east-west rail line with an overpass planned at Tenn. Hwy. 57. It is also near U.S. 72 in Mississippi.

Norfolk Southern refers to the $2.5 billion in system improvements in the Southeast as a “green” project, since it will be diverting freight traffic from highways to rails. Plans are to take freight off 1 million trucks, saving an estimated 170 million gal of fuel a year. Of those, 500,000 trucks would be diverted in both Tennessee and Mississippi, it says.

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