(The following story by Stephen Palkot appeared on the Fort Bend Herald website on October 4.)
ROSENBERG, Texas — Improving the flow of freight trains through Fort Bend County and Houston will cost a lot of money, require the cooperation of many groups and will be fraught with politics – but the leader of a newly formed rail group said he is optimistic the challenges can be surmounted.
“I’m encouraged, I’m optimistic with where we’re going,” said Mark Ellis, a former Houston City Councilman who now chairs the Gulf Coast Freight Rail District.
The district, created in 2005, combines the efforts of Fort Bend and Harris counties, the city of Houston and the Port of Houston in an effort to propose solutions to what has been increasingly crowded rail lines, as well as conflicts with rail and other traffic in the Houston area.
Ellis spoke Thursday at the annual infrastructure conference of the Rosenberg-Richmond Area Chamber of Commerce, where he addressed a group largely consisting of engineers and government officials. The rail district only recently began meeting, and Ellis conceded to the group he is new to the position, having been appointed roughly two months ago .
Rail took off in Houston from about 1900 to 1950, Ellis said, and the city became a hub for rail operations throughout Texas. During World War II in particular, he said, rail was booming, propelled by innovations like the refrigerated rail car.
The creation of the national highway system gave the trucking industry a great boost in the decades that followed, but rail took off again in the 1980s, Ellis told the audience at the Rosenberg Civic Center, in part because of the petrochemical industry’s demands. Technology, again, played a key role in this growth.
“Really, what has made the Port of Houston grow as fast as it has is the evolution of (shipping) containers and how it’s become easier to transfer things from ships and by freight rail,” he said.
Today, however, the decades-long, simultaneous growth of rail and the Houston area has resulted in a host of problems for both sides. Freight trains, for instance, may sometimes take up to 12 days to pass through Houston alone, given the sheer amount of trains running through the area. For Houston motorists, those trains in turn cause frustrations such as the increasingly common event of trains blocking road intersections, even parking for minutes at a time at such crossings.
Ellis said these problems will ultimately be the catalyst for rail companies and area governments to seek not only solutions, but to work together to fund new infrastructure throughout the region to alleviate these problems.
A recently released Texas Department of Transportation study identified several proposals to improve rail flow in the area, including the addition of a second rail track on the east-west Union Pacific line that cuts through Fort Bend County. Also examined by TxDOT was the construction of a rail “bypass” that would curve through southern Fort Bend County from Rosenberg to Sienna Plantation.
Ellis stressed that even if rail companies may have created many of the problems today, his group will need to work with them to find a solution, whatever that may end up being.
“If we don’t make it profitable for them, they’re not going to participate,” he said.