ROANOKE COUNTY, Va. – It’s the end of the line for the Roanoke Valley trash train. The rail spur to the landfill is being paved over and trucks will soon take over for rail cars.
Construction is underway in rural Montgomery County. Once hailed as revolutionary, all that’s left of the Waste Line Express Train is a stack of railroad ties. Dan Miles is the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority CEO and said this has been in the works for half a decade.
“We’ve been doing due diligence for about five years now, we started this process back in 2016,” Miles said.
For nearly 30 years, the trash train and its gondola cars split from the Norfolk Southern mainline in Ironto, traveling five miles to the tipper at the landfill. But due to rising freight costs and equipment issues, the tipper has gone dark.
“Our board ended up deciding to go ahead and make the transition to move forward with the trucking,” Miles said.
Trash will now be trucked to the landfill from near downtown Roanoke via Interstate 81. Where the rail was cut a few hundred yards from the existing switch, a new road will begin just north of the truck stop.
“It’s just a five-mile driveway to the facility, it’s a full two-lane road but it’s not open to the general public, it’s for operational use only,” operations manager Jeremy Garrett said.
Crews are preparing to pave over the remaining ballast and trucks should begin moving by mid-July, allowing the authority to keep its promise to local residents that trucks would not use local back roads to arrive at the facility.
“(They’ll go) directly into the back of our facility so there will be no need for us to go on any public roads once we get off of Interstate 81 under the new operation,” Garrett said.
For now, the valley’s trash is being trucked to the landfill in Dublin.
The end of the trash train is the latest split between the railroad and the region it birthed. Although local politicians tried to save it three years ago, Miles said short-haul rail just doesn’t work. Norfolk Southern has said the trash train didn’t fit its business model.
“Show me somebody else that’s doing it, no one else in our area is doing it and there’s a reason for it,” Miles said.
It’s unclear what will happen to the rail car tipper moving forward. According to the authority, it was one of the largest in the world when it entered service.