'BIGGEST ENGINEERING UNDERTAKING' HEADED BY ENGINEERING ALUM

In late March (after nearly a year of work), excavators still were a few hundred feet from the south end of Norfolk Southern's Big Sandy 1, a 2,627-foot railroad tunnel burrowed through a hill that sits along the Big Sandy River separating West Virginia from Kentucky. Their task: to carve a higher clearance in the ceiling of the tunnel, making it big enough to handle rail cars loaded with cargo containers stacked two-high, doubling the railroad's capacity and giving shippers more bang for their buck.

It is one of 28 tunnels that form the centerpiece of what Norfolk Southern calls "the Heartland Corridor," a sort of Northwest Passage for double-stack rail traffic between Hampton Roads and the Midwest that will shave 230 miles and about a day of transit time from existing routes. Combined with the port's 50-foot channels and ready access to the open sea, it's anticipated to have a magnetic effect on East Coast container traffic.

The taller tunnels will make Hampton Roads "much more competitive with the other ports," said Bob Billingsley, a 1976 computer engineering technology alumnus and Norfolk Southern's director of structural projects, who has been overseeing the tunnel work. "That's the only reason we're doing it. That's what it's all about."

For the past three years, working in the wee hours to avoid disrupting rail traffic, Billingsley's crews have been raising the roofs on tunnels in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky, enabling them to handle the 20-foot, 3 -inch-high container trains that have had to go around the mountains, through Pennsylvania and Tennessee, because the tunnels were too small.

"It's the biggest engineering undertaking we've had in the last 100 years - one of the biggest in modern railroad history, anyway," Billingsley said.

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