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The CSX Roundhouse

Posted Jun 22, 2007 by Billy Townsend

Updated Jun 22, 2007 at 05:57 PM

A weekly review of the state of play in the ongoing debate over the massive CSX rail hub planned for Winter Haven.

Lots of talk about quiet zones for downtown Lakeland this week. The bottom line from what I’ve seen is this: They are expensive or they are ugly, or both.

The federal official in town to talk about quiet zones showed slides of median separators that would certainly alter the look of downtown Lakeland if they were adopted. Other options for winning a quiet zone include closures of crossings or expensive new gate machinery.

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The Ledger ran its big story this week on the effects of blogging on the CSX deal. Lakeland Local and Empirical Polk both responded with intriguing posts. I particularly like this taxonomy of blogging – maybe because it’s nice to me – that Chuck at LL produced. But both blogs are very much worth reading this week if you’re following the CSX story.

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Chuck and I both happened to attend the CSX public meeting with the Lakeland Bipartisans group on Monday night. He gave his usual thorough and interesting account.

I took away three things from the meeting:

1) The CSX officials repeatedly and clearly – more clearly than I have ever heard them – said they don’t know if the second part of the ILC, the one that would produce most of the 2,000 predicted onsite jobs, will happen. They are focused on relocating their Orlando freight and vehicle transport operations to Winter Haven and building their intermodal business. Period. They couched any talk of the second, larger phase with lots of ifs.

2) CSX official Dan Moody gave the most detailed explanation I’ve heard of train traffic increases for downtown Lakeland. On the day the hub becomes operational, Lakeland would experience four additional trains on top of the up to 16 (including four Amtrak) it currently experiences. Two will be intermodal trains bound for Winter Haven. Two will be coal trains bound eventually for Orlando for use by utilities in that region. Two additional intermodal trains would be routed away from Lakeland, keeping the overall number at four.

But these new trains are simply due to the reorganization plan, not business from the hub.

Let’s talk about this in algebraic terms for a second. If X is the total number of trains in the current system, with the Orlando hub still operational, the total number of trains in the system when the Winter Haven hub opens will still be X. Lakeland’s portion of those trains looks like it will be 16, not counting the Amtrak trains. This doesn’t take into consideration growth in business at the new hub. Call that variable Y. The unanswered or unanswerable question right now for Lakeland is what will 16+Y be?

3) Cameron Wilson, the other CSX official in attendance, announced to the crowd, which asked some pretty tough questions: “The strong arm of the railroad is gone,” meaning that CSX can’t just get whatever it wants.

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Polk County’s 2030 Transportation Improvement Plan has reams of cool maps and data and other stuff. I have a paper copy, though it’s available for download here. (It’s called TRIP 2030.)

Anyway, I won’t begin to go into all of it here. But one of the maps shows the current truck traffic on major shipping routes through the county.

State Road 60, where it would connect with the CSX project, currently handles 4,280 to 7,546 trucks per day. Only I-4 has greater trucking volume, though a number of other Polk highways are in same range as S.R. 60.

The 1,000 or so trucks that the CSX project would immediately add amounts to a 13 to 23 percent increase in daily truck traffic on this stretch of 60. For what it’s worth.