Portageville Bridge Replacement, Future Tier Traffic

been quiet on here..any more work completed in the last week?

Has anyone heard how things are going with the Tiger2 grant that was being applied for for the bridge replacement project in Portageville?
-Paleoman52-

I heard Tiger II was rejected last week, but I can't get official attribution. Does anyone else have more?

Revert to this!
http://railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 7&start=30

Norfolk Southern can certainly afford the $39 million cost of a replacement bridge itself. It is disgusting to watch giant, for-profit and very profitable corporations hold their greedy palms out to Uncle Sam, through the intermediary facilitator of New York State. This rejected TIGER II grant of $17,750,000 should never have been applied-for in the first place.

Like I said in the other thread, they could probably build this entire bridge for less than a third of the cost of their new Greencastle Intermodal facility they broke ground on earlier this month... But I guess I can't fault them for trying to get some free money handouts. I'm not surprised it was rejected.

DonPevsner wrote:Norfolk Southern can certainly afford the $39 million cost of a replacement bridge itself. It is disgusting to watch giant, for-profit and very profitable corporations hold their greedy palms out to Uncle Sam, through the intermediary facilitator of New York State. This rejected TIGER II grant of $17,750,000 should never have been applied-for in the first place.

I disagree. The state and federal funding that has been spent on highways, airports and Great Lakes shipping over the past 80 years has siphoned alot of traffic off what is now the Southern Tier Mainline. And here's the kicker: only about half that money currently comes from fuel taxes. The rest comes from income, sales and local taxes. Since the competition (including I-390 and Rt 17/I-86) is getting money for improvements, I can see why NS wanted taxpayer dollars for the Portageville Bridge project. It's the fair thing to do, IMO.

Now that the grant was denied, will NS look at this route the same way? Will they look to add trains to PANYNY?

Wasn't this already mentioned??

NS is now looking at routing New England traffic via the NJ ports that may use the Eastern Tier to Binghamton and up the D&H up to Mechanicville, NY... If that does come to fruition then those trains won't even have the need to use Portageville!!

As much as some people may disagree with me, I never got the impression that any services were contingent on a new bridge. This was more "bragging" about their future plans rather than promises. From what I hear, the deals are in place already...

Bison Yard to become an inland port. New hiring underway in Buffalo, Corning, Binghamton. They're setting it up for 2011 for significant traffic.

I'd almost be willing to bet that if the projected traffic over the Tier to Bison actually materializes, a new bridge will pay for itself in a reasonable period of time. NS's pockets are deep enough to handle the project as long as the ROI is there to satisfy the beancounters.

Poppyl

And if they (NS) is paying for the whole thing by itself, how much you want to bet the bridge costs a lot less than they said it would when someone else was going to pick up a large share of the tab? Like NS is going to pay $20M if NY funded it or not! JS

When/where was this denied??

NS just pumped about $140 million into the PAS for improvements to their railroad. This project could be done for about a quarter of that cost and would probably benefit them more. If a new bridge really is a necessity, they can afford to build t. If they think the existing structure will last a while longer, they'll ignor the 10mph headache and keep using it. If this comes to fruition, I wonder if they'd make any improvements east of Port Jervis to better keep a time schedule.