How about a new idea for two Class I routes in North Carolina?

We’ve been told that both Norfolk Southern and CSX are busy planning their futures by focusing on the heaviest trafficked mainlines and downgrading lightly used coal routes or selling or leasing them to other operators. I am particularly curious about the fate of one of NS’s secondary lines, the S-line from Salisbury, N.C., to Knoxville, Tenn., via Asheville and the famous Loops near Old Fort. The loops, as you’ll recall, consists of a 13-mile section of track that twists and turns using cuts, fills, bridges, and tunnels and anything else it can get a grip on to rise out of the Piedmont and thrust itself across the Blue Ridge front. It is quite the show of railroading. I grew up near here, and I’ve observed this railroad closely for all of my life. I wrote about it in our September 2006 issue.

 In the last few months, in a cost cutting move, NS downgraded the line from 40 mph to 25 mph, shifted traffic to other lines, and put Asheville yard in charge of folks off site. Watco, the shortline holding company, took over in 2015 the line to the south toward the power plant at Skyland, N.C., and to the west to Sylva, N.C., as its Blue Ridge Southern Railroad. (Look for a feature story about the Blue Ridge Southern operation across Balsam Mountain in our pages soon.) Most of the traffic there is the paper plant at Canton, N.C.

 The S-line has plenty of local freight in its first 50 miles west of Salisbury. Between that city and Hickory, locals P60 and P61 do a rousing business at grain elevators, cement plants, and other industries. There’s a Duke Energy coal-fired power plant at Catawba, which I think will be around a while. But there’s not much carload traffic in and around Asheville any more. The line west of Asheville to Bulls Gap, Tenn., perches on the French Broad River, where there is little room to plant industries that generate carloads.

 One day soon, I would not be surprised if Watco was operating the entire S-line. Whether they keep going down the French Broad River to the west I think is a great question: It’s a beautiful piece of railroad, but there’s just not much traffic there as I saw from an inspection train a few years ago.

 In the same part of Western North Carolina, CSX has likewise downgraded its former Clinchfield main line. The S-line and the former CRR cross at a quiet location appropriately called Clinchcross, just east of Marion, N.C.

And that leads me to a proposition I have for NS, CSX, and Watco: Sell the S-line to Watco, add southern end of the former Clinchfield, the CSX route between Johnston City, Tenn., and Spartanburg, S.C. Make one plus-sign-shaped regional railroad out of it. Watco can work to land local traffic, and it can open up both routes to overhead trains of both southeastern Class I railroads. Imagine a CSX train at Knoxville, bound for Hamlet, N.C., avoiding Atlanta with a trip via Asheville and Charlotte. Or an NS train out of Spartanburg, bound for the upper Midwest, heading up the CSX to Johnson City before rejoining home rails. A through route through the southern Appalachian Mountains was long desired back in the 1800s; today, maybe such a route, operated by a regional and shared by two Class I railroads, might just be a creative way to keep both these routes viable.