In respect to my remarks, I have over 56 years in trucking starting in 1939. I have done about everything, from driving to general traffic manager with Houff Transfer for 30 years.

First, when trucking started, it was to replace rail service that would be faster and door-to-door. It became very successful and grew very rapidly and the growth was solely because of service.

When Interstate 81 came along, it was aimed at getting trucks off U.S. 11, and it did, along with all of the automobiles. So now, they want trucks off I-81 and put on rail. Back to square one.

It won’t work. I helped set up a piggyback service on the C&O Railroad with Smith Transfer and Houff Transfer between Staunton and Charleston, W.Va. This was done because Route 60 between Covington and Charleston, W.Va., is mountainous, crooked and two-laned and took eight to 10 hours to drive from Staunton. Piggyback didn’t work because it took from one to three hours on each end at the rail ramp. At times, there was not a switch engine to put the flat cars into the ramp.

This all comes back to making I-81 work. If there were three lanes on every grade with no trucks in the third lane, it would spread the traffic out and eventually have three lanes in each direction.

I have often wondered why Virginia pays so much money to hire engineers to solve this problem which won’t work anyway. I thought DOT had its own engineers. If they can’t do the job, then we need to make some changes.

Like I said, it’s rail, truck, rail, truck and trucks are here to stay. We need them.