Railways and Expansions:

Sometime when you're not in a hurry pull off of Poplar by the railroad tracks and count the double-stacked, truck trailers on a Norfolk Southern train. You will get results of 200-225 truck trailers. So what?

Well, that means that 200-225 long-haul trucks and drivers are not driving and beating up the US highways plus the per mile costs for freight are dramatically lower and more 'green'. More than 80 percent of Norfolk Southern trains east bound out of Memphis are going to Harrisburg, PA where short- haul distribution occurs into the East Coast. When Norfolk Southern completes its planned Memphis expansion, more than 1.0 million trucks per year will be on rail rather than on Interstate 40 and Interstate 81 into the northeast.

In a recent editorial in the Memphis Business Journal entitled 'Major investments by railroads bode well for city's future', http://memphis.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2009/10/05/editorial1.html, there is a description of the current investments being made in Memphis today by the major US and Canadian railroads.

The attached map shows the Class 1 railroad system in the United States which indicates the robust position Memphis has in the intermodal freight network. As the federal government pushes to transform the trucking industry into a short-haul industry, more and more long-haul trucks will be off the road and on trains. Intermodal nodes like Memphis will greatly benefit from freight and value-added processes in our market.