Tommy Denton

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Thanks to the instructive news coverage of Roanoke Times reporter Ray Reed, Rail Solutions has received due recognition as a splendid example of David-versus-Goliath democracy in action.

Formed some four years ago to oppose a massive widening of Interstate 81 in favor of shifting a greater proportion of the nation's shipping from trucks to trains, Rail Solution began as a small cluster of people opposed to what they saw as a destructive, wasteful rape of Western Virginia.

As Reed reported Sunday, those few advocates grew in number and influence, contributing eventually to major readjustments to plans for increasing capacity in the overwhelmed I-81 corridor. Once virtually dismissed by an impatient Virginia Department of Transportation, the rail option is now more likely to become part of the I-81 solution.

In fairness, the four-year debate has not always been conducted with unyielding respect for factual accuracy. The corporate juggernaut that sought to build a multitude of truck lanes, financed richly by tolls to reimburse its executives and stockholders, enjoyed the early momentum that comes from paying handsomely for favors in Washington's K Street corridors of influence-peddling.

In response, opponents -- including Rail Solution -- have fought back with figures, projections and speculations that were passionate and generally accurate but that also on occasion were, shall we say, flexibly applicable. The heat of public argument, especially when the stakes are high, has always contributed to a grudging acknowledgment of some hyperbole in the political discourse.

Even so, the long-term inefficiencies and damage in the form of environmental threats and the squandering of precious energy resources put the rail supporters on the side of the angels.

It's been an uphill battle to reverse the mind-numbingly bad idea to allow swashbuckling corporate construction giants to have their way with I-81. Born in the fevered imagination of U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, the separate truck lanes were Young's idea of a nationwide, federally mandated monument to, well, himself.

A consortium called Star Solutions -- headed by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root -- jumped on the opportunity to propose a plan that would draw on federal money earmarked for I-81 upgrades, considered by Young to be a case study in building what he considered his legacy.

In the intervening years, although the state agency responsible for studying the upgrades initially dismissed a rail component to ease I-81 congestion, persistent advocacy by rail supporters, Roanoke state Sen. John Edwards and Gov. Tim Kaine fortunately has restored consideration of a rail option to the planning.

Realistically, the projected $13 billion cost of a fully upgraded I-81 makes small potatoes of the available relative pittance of $141 million in the federal earmark, plus a $28 million state match. Sadly, much progress at the state level faces gloomy prospects because of the irresponsible resistance among the legislative leadership in the Virginia House of Delegates to provide the resources essential to the commonwealth's transportation, and thus economic, future.

For now, some hope glows on the horizon in a merging relationship between the state and Norfolk Southern to chart a course toward easing overcrowded highways by moving significant amounts of interstate-clogging truck traffic to far more efficient freight trains.

In an ideal world, everyone would agree on objectives, purposes and interests, and all would go swimmingly. But it's not ideal, and politically sensitive bureaucratic state agencies and oligarchical railroad corporations have different interests. Occasionally, the larger public interest may get misplaced.

Just as the study by VDOT concluded, incorrectly, in its preliminary Tier I report that rail would not provide significant relief, Norfolk Southern -- understandably but with less than a robust sense of corporate citizenship -- has been somewhat secretive and officious with the taxpayers expected to lay a disproportionate share of track to its profitability.

Without exhortations in the last four years from the likes of Rail Solution and the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, among others, the corporate juggernauts could already have cut their swath from Bristol to Winchester and wreaked havoc with communities, ecologically sensitive areas and some historical sites such as the Civil War Battle of Cedar Creek at the northern edge of the Shenandoah Valley.

Bless those public-spirited "nuisances" so essential to democracy.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.