The Greencastle, Pennsylvania-based Norfolk Southern Railway officially broke ground for the new Franklin County Regional Intermodal Facility in Greencastle on Tuesday.
The $95 million facility is part of the railroad's multi-state Crescent Corridor initiative to establish an efficient, high-capacity intermodal freight rail route between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast.
The groundbreaking is for the first of four new Crescent Corridor intermodal terminals Norfolk Southern plans to construct over the next two years.
"The Franklin County Regional Intermodal Facility is ideally located to serve the Mid-Atlantic region and is a critical component of our Crescent Corridor," said Norfolk's CEO Wick Moorman.
"Intermodal terminals like the one Norfolk Southern broke ground on today are proven centers for investment, infrastructure improvement, and business growth," said Congressman Bill Shuster, Ranking Republican on the House Subcommittee on Railroads.
The Crescent Corridor is a program of improvements to infrastructure and other facilities geared toward creating a high capacity 2,500 mile intermodal route spanning from New Jersey to Louisiana that touches 26 percent of the nation's population and 30 percent of the nation's manufacturing output. It provides the shortest intermodal double stack route between the South and the Northeast. When fully operational it will handle more rail freight traffic faster and more reliably, creating or benefiting more than 70,000 green jobs by 2030 and producing these estimated annual benefits: 1.3 million long-haul trucks diverted from interstates, $141 million in accident avoidance savings, 1.8 million tons in CO2 reduction, $565 million in congestion savings, and $262 million in highway maintenance savings.