The 611's return and Roanoke's future

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The Roanoke (Va.) Times, May 30, 2015, Editorial



The 611's return and Roanoke's future



Today, the famous steam locomotive known as "the 611" rolls back into Roanoke after a year of being taken apart and refurbished in North Carolina.



It is a glorious moment for rail fans, and for Roanoke. When the engine was pulled out of Roanoke last year, some 5,000 people showed up to watch it leave. Now that it's returning under its own power, the Virginia Museum of Transportation guesses maybe 10,000 will turn out today.



When the 611 rolled out of the East End shops for the first time in 1950, it was part of a class of 14 engines that were the most powerful steam locomotives ever built.



It also symbolized a Roanoke that was then arguably at the height of its economic power, at least relative to its position with other cities in the Upper South.



Now, out of all those mechanical behemoths, only this one example remains. All the rest were all-too-hastily scrapped nearly six decades ago when Norfolk & Western abandoned steam and converted to diesel.



Ironically, the 611 returns to Roanoke just as the company that gave it birth is leaving — sort of.



The railroad headquarters left Roanoke 33 years ago, when the Norfolk & Western merged with the Southern Railway to become Norfolk Southern. Still, a sizable office remained, perhaps out of practicality, perhaps out of sentiment. In a more ruthless corporate world, if that can be imagined, those jobs would have left in 1982.



Instead, 426 of them stayed on until Norfolk Southern announced earlier this year it would consolidate from three major offices to two, with Roanoke, unsurprisingly, losing out to Norfolk and Atlanta.



We still have the rails, of course, and the jobs that go with the daily operations of the trains; just not the office jobs downtown.



The 611's return is a good time then to think back on where Roanoke stood in 1950 — and think about what questions that might hold for today.



Some statistics:



In 1950, the Roanoke Valley was bigger than Charlotte.



Bigger than Raleigh.



Bigger than Greensboro.



Size is not all that matters, of course. Not many people today would want the Roanoke Valley to be bigger than those places. And while demography is destiny, so, too, is geography. All those places are surrounded by flat land that make it easy to expand; we're not, so to a certain extent, the mountains constrain our economic fortunes. One of the frequent complaints in economic development circles is that it's hard to find enough flat land to develop as potential industrial sites.



Just being flat isn't enough, either. Microsoft came oh-so-close to locating a data center in Montgomery County in 2010 — until a sinkhole opened up in the Falling Branch Corporate Park. The karst geology that creates caverns underground helped send Microsoft to flat-and-stable Mecklenburg County instead — and that's why the little town of Boydton now has the fastest Internet service in the state of Virginia, about 14 times faster than the average speed in Roanoke.



Still, one wonders: Was there anything that Roanoke leaders could have done differently in 1950 that would have led to a stronger economy here today? Could we have leveraged our economic strength in a different way?



That may seem a ridiculously long time to think about, but it's not, really. In 1950, the two pillars of Roanoke's economy were the railroad and the American Viscose rayon plant in Southeast, and Roanoke seemed a powerhouse. Perhaps no one was thinking it was necessary to make any big structural changes to the economy; why mess with a good thing?



Just eight years later, though, Viscose closed and the railroad shut down steam, and all the jobs that went with it. Unemployment shot up to over 10 percent; and Roanoke Valley civic leaders mounted a serious push to diversify the economy. That clearly paid off; today Roanoke has the second most diverse economy in the state, just a percentage point behind Richmond. So decisions made in the aftermath of the 1958 crisis still very much manifest themselves in 2015.



Diversity, though, is not necessarily the same thing as vibrancy, as anyone who's explored the local job market well knows.



With that and all the other history in mind, here are some things to think about today as the 611 returns.



Why hasn't Roanoke County moved to bring broadband Internet to the county (while Roanoke and Salem have joined together to do so)? Does it not believe that Internet access is vital to a 21st century economy? The "State of the Internet 2014" report by a Massachusetts technology firm found that the average Internet speed in the Roanoke Valley is not only below that of Petersburg and Danville, it is below that of Latvia. Why does the county board think this is sufficient in the modern economy?



Do we have enough large building sites — especially with rail access? (We'll give you a hint: The answer is "no.") Right now, the region has no sites easily developable for a company that wants more than 60 acres of land. Sometimes our geography is deceptive. The Roanoke County Center for Research & Technology is 480 acres, but only 211 acres are suitable for construction and the way the land lies, the biggest single parcel is 57 acres. The Western Virginia Regional Industrial Facility Authority — created just a few years ago — is now in the process of trying to fix that, but first it has to find the land.



What other investments should we be making to develop the regional economy? We're told repeatedly that one of the keys to attracting employers is having a labor pool that fits their needs. Toward that end, should there be more emphasis on the workforce training programs through the community colleges? Or pushing quality-of-life issues to make us a more amenable place for young professionals? Or both? The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.



All that's a lot to think about — and, ideally, to ask your elected officials and those who would like to be elected officials about. But there are two other things to think about today as the 611 returns: What's the best spot downtown to view it from? And what time should you get there to claim it?