Son of the Bridge to Nowhere - New York Times

As a corrollary to Ms. Bly's topic regarding the efficacy of some CSX abandonments, comes a New York Times editorial appearing Sunday April 22. This piece is lambasting an initiative for Federal funding to rebuild the CSX Gulf Coast line on the mainland in place of the just rebuilt existing line along the peninsula.

Apparently, the casino industry thinks the existing routing interferes with access to their coastline palaces - and they have an "ear' with Senator Trent Lott (R-MS).

I guess if this proposal moves forth, it will be one more instance of the phonemenom noted by Ms. Bly that if CSX has just relaid welded rail somewhere, you can be sure they are about to abandon it.

Here's a 'brief passage' from the editorial:

• It was only last month that the Senate staged a breast-beating debate about the need to control the rampant pork-spending abuse of earmarks — boondoggle appropriations tucked into vital legislation with little public scrutiny. Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, orated on the side of the angels in calling for reform. Well, the angels have lost another player. As the Senate returns from recess it will confront the year's prize porker blithely trotted out by Senator Lott — a $700 million earmark to relocate a Gulf Coast rail line, which was just rebuilt, post-Katrina, at a cost of $250 million.
  
  Invoked in the name of public safety, the project is actually a transparent attempt to tap already scarce hurricane reconstruction funds so the rail bed can be replaced by a touristy "beach boulevard" long sought by Mississippi to aid the casino industry and coastal developers. The railroad relocation dwarfs the $223 million "bridge to nowhere" proposed for the Alaska outback, the giveaway that brought all the vows for reform from Congress

The 'rest of the story' (free content):
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/opinion/23Sun1.html

Here's a similar article that was posted on trains.com:


Mississippi presses for removal of CSX along the Gulf Coast

WASHINGTON - The Mississippi Senate delegation is using a mammoth bill funding hurricane relief and the war in Iraq to have taxpayers foot the $700 million cost of closing CSX’s just-rebuilt line along Mississippi's Gulf Coast, according to an Associated Press story in the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.

CSX’s 146-mile NO&M Subdivision linking New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., runs east-west through virtually every city and town along the Gulf Coast, and was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. CSX and its insurers just spent about $300 million repairing it. Now, Mississippi GOP Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott want to tear it up again and use the right-of-way to build a new highway along the congested coastline. Floated as alternatives is the building of a new CSX route farther inland or re-routing traffic altogether.

Lott is from coastal Pascagoula and is the project's longtime champion; Cochran supplies much-needed muscle as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which approved the project Tuesday as part of a $107 billion-plus measure funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and additional hurricane relief.

Critics are already blasting the move as a power play by the Mississippians, accusing them of using the must-pass Iraq and Katrina legislation to advance a home-state project that's hardly an emergency.

"For $700 million, the Congress could certainly do a lot more to help people that are still without homes," said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group. "It's certainly unclear what this has to do with an emergency. It sounds like a wish list from the senators from Mississippi."

The plan to tear up the track isn't very popular with CSX either. They're negotiating with state and federal officials, and the $700 million price tag was determined largely by the railroad.

"We rebuilt that line across the Gulf Coast as quickly as possible because it's a critical artery for us," said CSX spokesman Gary Sease. "It serves our purposes. It meets our customers' needs. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it."

But Mississippi officials like Lott and Gov. Haley Barbour have long wanted to replace the rail line, which causes traffic jams along north-south roads, with a new east-west road to supplement the heavily congested U.S. 90.

"It's going to be very important to the future economy of the Coast," said Mississippi Power President Anthony Topazi, who was vice chairman of a state commission on Katrina recovery planning. "We were already hamstrung in terms of traveling east and west along the Coast, and we needed a new route, and we suddenly had this really great opportunity."

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trent lott is a real scumbag