As a boy, Mark Whallon prowled the woods near his Farmingdale Road home, sneaking up to the railroad line and laying pennies on the tracks.

"We played all around there," said Whallon. The tracks were relatively quiet, with few spare boxcars to climb. But the hike and the flattened pennies were the thrill.

Whallon grew up, moved away and then returned to the same house where he grew up. Farmingdale Road hasn't changed much, but his attitude toward the rail line did. Now it was part of the landscape, even mundane. He likes it that way.

But he worries the relative calm may also wind up relegated to memory.

The single rail line could soon be replaced by a series of tracks filled with dozens of spare boxcars. The Dillerville Rail Yard, now operating off Harrisburg Avenue in the northwest corner of the City of Lancaster, may be shifted west, a portion of it situated on a 12-acre site to the rear of the U.S. Post Office — in those woods where Whallon played as a kid, which actually sit atop an old dump.

The idea is that Norfolk Southern would then sell its 30-acre Dillerville Rail Yard to Franklin & Marshall College and Lancaster General Hospital. College athletic fields would be built, maybe some retail or office space; the industrial scar which now slashes across the redeveloped landscape would be erased, replaced by something more in keeping with Clipper Magazine Stadium, the Lancaster Arts Hotel and College Row.

The biggest players in town have lined up behind the project. F&M and LGH would benefit; so would the city. So would Norfolk Southern, which needs room to grow. The project benefits everybody.

Except, maybe, the folks who live near the western edge of the proposed rail yard, who think they're being asked to take one for the team.

"I think the overall project, for Lancaster, is excellent," said Whallon.

"But I feel like we're being railroaded."

First idea
John Fry, president of F&M, said that when he began mulling the idea of finding a new home for Norfolk Southern, his first thought was: Baker Campus.

The college already owned the wedge-shaped property behind the Villa Nova restaurant on Harrisburg Pike, currently home to some of its sports fields. It was zoned industrial. It was big enough.

"But then Keith [Orris, the college's vice president for administrative services and external affairs] said, 'Hey, what about the dump?' " said Fry.

The dump was Whallon's old stomping ground, abandoned in 1962. The woods have grown up around it; a walk through those woods, however, provides ample evidence of the garbage below.

Old bottle caps, jagged shards of green glass, broken bricks — from a nearby brickyard, also abandoned — litter the ground. Much of it looks as if it were dumped yesterday, but the stuff has simply been grinding its way to the surface.

"Whoever owned it at the time, the practice was to fill in low-lying areas [with trash], up against the railroad berm," said Jim Warner, executive director of the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority, which owns the site and would sell it to Norfolk Southern as part of the deal. "They'd put a little dirt over it," and that was that.

But that isn't that. In a lagoon mere feet from the Little Conestoga Creek, which borders the site, rust-colored sludge accumulates. This is leachate, material that has seeped through the soil from the trash buried beneath it.

Warner said testing shows the site isn't a major concern, and he noted that everyone in the area is on public water.

But Fry, noting that environmental issues are among opponents' chief concerns, said the college would dig out all the old garbage, haul it to the authority's Frey Farm Landfill — and replace it with clean dirt.

It's just one of the ways he thinks the new rail yard will actually have a net environmental benefit to nearby neighborhoods.

The consolidation of the rail yard will permit Norfolk Southern to handle more freight — removing more trucks from the roadway, and emissions from the air. "From an environmental standpoint, rail transit is really the way to go," said Fry.

In tough economic times, more and more people think rail is the way to go, said Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband. "We're going through explosive growth," he said; the company considered expanding the current Dillerville yard, but "it wasn't constructed in a very efficient way," he said. So the company was open to suggestions that might allow it to build a new yard with more tracks, longer tracks.

The plan now on the drawing board achieves that; and the longer tracks permit longer lines of cars, which may mean even less crashing and banging at the new rail yard than at the current site.

"Instead of pulling cars from four to five tracks," he said, all the needed cars could be kept on two tracks. And however much noise the shunting and coupling generates, it would be concentrated in an area on the northeastern side of Harrisburg Pike, near the R.R. Donnelley & Sons plant; the tracks on the other side of the road, closer to the Barrcrest neighborhood and Farmingdale Road, would be used primarily for boxcar storage.

Questions asked
Last week, a booklet featuring "Frequently Asked Questions" about the project began landing in neighbors' mailboxes. In it, F&M and LGH try to allay residents' concerns, explaining the plan and how they plan to mitigate the impact. F&M officials have hosted several "living room" meetings where they have gone into neighbors' homes to explain the project; more are planned, along with a bigger public meeting sometime in June.

Opponents, however, are wary of this format. "F&M is trying to divide and conquer," said Sarah Young Fisher, another Farmingdale resident who dislikes the project. Noting that the June public meeting will have separate "stations," where residents can ask specific questions of specific officials or experts, she said she'd prefer a big, general, open public meeting.

But Fry said the college had little interest in a "screamfest"; he's more interested in talking to people one-on-one, finding out what their concerns are — and trying to answer them the best he can, rather than getting into a confrontation.

Young Fisher, Whallon and several other residents call their nascent group TRRAAC, for The Rail Road Action and Advisory Committee. Actually, the group had been using the acronym TRAC, but got a cease-and-desist letter from a company noting that the term was trademarked, said Whallon.

"There's this general consensus that [moving the rail yard] is for the betterment of the city, to not have trains there by the Barnstormers," Young Fisher said. She worries specifically about the possibility of a chlorine leak; how would residents of her neighborhood get out?

"F&M doesn't want this where students are, but it's OK to put it where people live," she said.

"We all have a natural reaction to change, and people want to know what this means to them," said John Lines, spokesman for Lancaster General Hospital. The neighbors' concerns, he said, are legitimate; and the FAQ booklet tries to answer them, noting that there will be no additional locomotives working at the new rail yard and thus no significant overall increase in emissions, and that high-intensity lighting won't be needed during evening hours. There will be some new lights installed, but the impact is expected to be minimal.

In terms of noise, Fry said the college might erect sound barriers, or a berm planted with trees — whatever the engineers believe will do the best job of muffling the sound, he said.

$40 million project
The project is expected to cost $40 million; the college and LGH are investing $6 million, Norfolk Southern $2 million. The remainder, officials hope, can be secured through state and federal grant programs.

"This is such an unbelievable opportunity," said Lisa Riggs, executive director of the James Street Improvement District, which is funded by F&M and LGH, but also represents residents of the city's northwest. For years, she noted, local officials have dreamed about the possibilities that this project would make possible. Reconnecting city streets such as Liberty and Clay; turning a brown and gray industrial zone into something new and vibrant.

"We were extremely concerned in 2003 and 2004 when Norfolk Southern was thinking of expanding" the current Dillerville yard, she said. As important as the railroad is to the county from an economic standpoint, to have it smack in the middle of a region newly defined by offices and retail and college buildings, right across the street from the new Lancaster Arts Hotel, simply wouldn't work.

But now, for the railroad "to be able to expand along its current line in an area that's already zoned for industry, and knit back city streets — it's just extraordinary," said Riggs.

And for Mark Whallon, there's the rub.

He doesn't want to stand in the way, though he wonders why the railroad can't consolidate on a site closer to Dillerville Road and the Armstrong flooring plant.

"I think [John] Fry does good things. I like the idea of connecting the city," said Whallon. "And LGH — I'm a Baby Boomer, I'm going to need that.

"I'm not against any of it — I'm only against the 12-acre footprint they want to put behind our neighborhood."

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Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.