While Norfolk Southern still uses the O-Line to service several industrial customers in the area north of Charlotte, according to Lake Norman Publications, the main value of the O-Line to Norfolk Southern lies in its strategic value in negotiating with the North Carolina Railroad Company:The line – as Gray, Thunberg and Woods acknowledged years ago, and railroad historian and writer Dan Robie explains in an essay on the wvncrails.org website – combines with Norfolk Southern’s L-Line (between Winston-Salem and northern Mooresville) to provide an alternative to a high-demand 90-mile section of North Carolina Railroad Company (NCRC) owned track Norfolk Southern currently pays to use between Greensboro and Charlotte.
[8]According to news media outlets in the Charlotte region (such as WCNC), Norfolk Southern has always maintained a continuous and open stance on the possibility of CATS using the O-Line for a Commuter Rail route to Lake Norman.
[9][10] On May 22, 2023 Norfolk Southern O-Line customer fxi (formerly known as Foamex) began layoffs and stopped manufacturing operations.
This was the last customer to utilize Norfolk Southern's O-Line and thus ends any rail traffic on the line for the foreseeable future.
[13] The letter was sent two months after the closure of the last Norfolk Southern customer to use the O-Line, and around the same time that Charlotte City Council had approved $5 million to update the existing Red Line design.