TUPELO — A trip through the city of Tupelo wouldn’t seem complete without an encounter with a freight train, but efforts are underway to make such daily interruptions less time-consuming, inconvenient and harmful.
City leaders and rail representatives have been hearing traffic-related frustrations from residents and visitors for years, and work on three of the cheapest options is now gradually getting underway. There are no solutions at all that don’t have at least two commas in the price, and all of which take a long time to come to fruition.
Create quiet zones
The creation of quiet zones, the southward relocation of the rail yard and the construction of a rail overpass on Eason Boulevard are all being actively pursued, although all involved admit that the arduous pace of change can be frustrating in itself. However, all three are on their way.
Tupelo City Engineer Dennis Bonds compared the work on the three projects to beavers building a dam. Much of the work is done ‘underwater’ and will only be visible when it surfaces.
The city has received $9.1 million in grants from the Federal Railroad Administration, plus $4.6 million from the state of Mississippi, to help it continue to address the problems. When that money flows into city coffers, engineering design work on all three projects will be accelerated, with a special focus on the quiet zones and the Eason Viaduct.
Some improvements needed to achieve Quiet Zone status have been completed. Tupelo upgraded the intersections at Park and Spring streets last year, and there are other intersections that have received the required status, but there are still 11 more to go before quiet zones can be implemented.
For an intersection to meet the standards required for a quiet zone, it must be essentially impossible for a motor vehicle to enter the track once the crossed arms are turned off and the lights and bells are ringing. The FRA requires that every train passing through an intersection announce its presence through its horns. Because several connected intersections are close together, they all need to be improved before a set of quiet zones can be implemented.
The improvements won’t make the city a complete quiet zone, however, as engineers say it would be extremely impractical to bring the Crosstown intersection at Main and Gloster up to that level. Engineers consulting with cities on intersection construction have put forward photos of Crosstown as an example of what exactly not to do.
Otherwise, the quiet zones should bring significant relief to downtown neighborhoods and businesses where telephone, teleconference or other communications are interrupted several times a day due to the blaring noise.
“People in downtown Tupelo do business all over the world, and routinely interrupting conversations to wait for a train to pass by is more of a nuisance than anything,” said Tupelo Major Todd Jordan.
However, the planned railroad overpass for Eason Boulevard could affect other qualities of life for area residents, including life itself.
“I vividly remember being on the bus one night returning from an away high school game and being stopped by a train on Eason,” Jordan said. He was a three-sport athlete at Tupelo High School. “There was an ambulance between us and the train, and we could see the medical staff in the ambulance performing chest compressions on the patient they were transporting.”
That was someone’s father or brother, someone’s wife or daughter in there, Jordan said, and their chances of survival were dwindling because of a traffic problem.
“I know our community has been working on ways to solve problems with trains for a long time, and I know it takes time to do things,” he said. “But it’s one of the things I definitely wanted to improve further. ”
All aboard
The process of pursuing grants, both state and federal, requires a lot of long-term consistency and a steady application of pressure.
“Senator Wicker’s office has been great to work with, and so have our legislators,” Jordan said. “Working with the Federal Railroad Administration and the railroads themselves is a decades-long process, but we are working hard to keep the solutions moving. forward.”
“Rail is vital to this community,” Wicker said. “The railroad put Tupelo on the map. And yet it brings problems.”
Over the years, many city authorities have commissioned research into the collected railway issues, but most solutions proposed have proven to be financially impossible. Jordan’s position was to improve what can be improved over time.
It’s one thing to wait for a train to clear while the train is moving along smoothly. Waiting for someone to back up and then move on, sometimes multiple times, creates frustration of a different degree. Moving the railroad switching yard further south would be intended to remove railroad shunting operations from Tupelo’s daily life.
The relocation of the switchyard will be a project that is likely to take more time than the realization of the quiet zones and the viaduct, but the engineering and design work on this will also soon gain momentum.
Historical impact, essential contribution
It is easy to lose sight of the significant positive aspects of rail when analyzing the associated problems, but without the rail access that the community has, the community certainly would not be what it has become. Tupelo’s historic growth is closely tied to rail access and remains an indispensable part of the community’s healthcare system.
While many communities have rail access, the fact that Tupelo offers industries both north-south and east-west rail access has been a phenomenal positive factor.
More than 125 years ago, the north-south oriented Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad was joined by the east-west St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad.
According to the then Tupelo Daily Journal, the combined freight handled in and out of Tupelo by the two roads in 1911 was 150,000 tons per year. By then, the railroad had helped the community grow from a population of 1,000 in 1890 to 4,500 in 1912.
Thanks to a century of mergers, the east-west route through Tupelo is now operated by Burlington Northern Santa Fe, while the north-south route belongs to Canadian Pacific Kansas City.
Today, in addition to pickup and delivery, Lee County rail is directly responsible for the presence of 17 major industries in the city and surrounding industrial parks, which together employ 8,129 residents. This primary employment includes 2,300 people at Goodyear, 1,300 at Stanley Black & Decker, 2,400 at Toyota and many others.
In addition, countless other industries depend on rail in a secondary or incidental manner.
“The recent expansion at Ashley Furniture would not have been possible without the rail access we have,” said Maury Giachelli, director of existing business development at the Community Development Foundation. “Rail is really one of the biggest reasons why the Tupelo area is thriving. Rail transport is an indispensable condition for the recruitment of new industries in the area. Location selectors who assess communities for the location of new industries expect to see this.”
The traffic frustrations it causes are a byproduct of the booming growth it has generated. Alleviating that frustration to a reasonable degree continues to bring Tupelo and the railroads closer together.
