Virginia Economic Review

Food and beverage and pharmaceutical companies rely on Virginia’s cold chain infrastructure to succeed.

If you imagine timelines as train tracks and key events as moments when tracks converge, this is a pivotal time for rail in Virginia.

Connections are an essential foundation of business success — and businesses trust Virginia’s infrastructure to provide a multimodal transportation system that reliably connects them to suppliers, customers, and partners.

States, nations, and any municipality can build and tout their critical infrastructure that, on the surface, may appear second to none. Think: thriving, automated food and agriculture ecosystems. Sprawling office buildings outfitted with remote smart sensors. Unflappable financial markets.

Early in the morning of March 27, a container ship about as tall as the Eiffel Tower left the Port of Baltimore going approximately 9 mph. The ship, named the Dali, was fully loaded with cargo and weighed nearly 100,000 tons.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged on over the last two years, contractors became more popular as people reevaluated the spaces where they lived (and suddenly worked).