Canadian Pacific Railway announced last week it move forward in buying Norfolk Southern with or without Norfolk Southern’s cooperation.
County officials and business leaders are wasting no time in expressing their concerns.
“We are a railroad community,” said Marty Marasco, President and CEO of the Altoona-Blair County Development Corporation. “Those ashes and cinders are in the lifeblood of this community.”
Canadian Pacific made a $28 billion offer mid-November to buy Norfolk Southern.
“Any time you hear the word ‘merger’, ‘acquisition’, ‘consolidation’, you always have a concern about how your area is gonna fair in that type of a situation,” Marasco said.
As CP moves forward with the merger, local leaders are reaching out to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board with their concerns.
“We just want the Surface Transportation Board to take a look at that and scrutinize the transaction if it should move forward so that good decisions can be made,” Marasco said.
The railroad may no longer be in its heyday, but still more than 1,000 people are employed in Blair County. That’s a payroll exceeding more than $60 million each year.
“If you look at the multiplier effect, the direct economic impact would be probably hundreds of millions of dollars with people that supply product to the shops and vice versa,” Marasco said. “So local businesses it would funnel down through. So it would have a major impact on this community.”
Leaders for the county’s chamber of commerce agree.
“Our concern, naturally, is that Norfolk Southern invests a great deal here,” President Joe Hurd said. “The financial impact alone is enormous… To the maximum degree it would bring our local economy to its knees.”
The fate of the Juniata Shops poses a crippling threat to the area.
“There has been a tendency on the part of Canadian Pacific to kind of break up the components,” Marasco said. “Naturally, we don’t want to see that happen.”
About ten to 15 groups in Blair County have written letters to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board thusfar.