(The following story by Roger Croteau appeared on the San Antonio Express-News website on December 26.)
SAN MARCOS, Texas — A new bridge on a secondary road usually opens without fanfare or notice.
But this isn’t your ordinary overpass.
Dozens of former and current elected officials, including Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, followed a high school drum line and dance team in a triumphant march Thursday over the new Wonder World Drive overpass that spans the two sets of Union Pacific Railroad tracks bisecting San Marcos.
The celebration, including speeches and a champagne christening, marked the end of a project 26 years in the making, one that local officials said will ease headaches and maybe even save lives.
“It is a big deal for us,” said San Marcos spokeswoman Melissa Millicam. “We’ve been working and waiting a long time.”
San Marcos has 26 rail crossings, and until now had none with an overpass. And the tracks are used daily by more than 30 trains, some as long as a mile and a half. Those long freight trains can block all the east-west traffic in the city. And sometimes the trains stop, leaving drivers fuming with no way to reach their destination until the train clears the tracks.
“Oh, it can drive you crazy when you’re trying to get to class on time,” said Texas State University-San Marcos student Ray Gomez. “On the other hand, you’ve always got an excuse if you are late. People believe you if you say there was a train stopped on the tracks, because everyone’s been there.”
The lack of an overpass was more than an inconvenience.
Most of the city’s population lives west of the tracks, but Hays County’s only hospital, the Central Texas Medical Center, is on the east side. City records show that over three years, from 2003 through 2005, ambulances were delayed from reaching the hospital by a train 1,465 times. The average delay was about three minutes. The Wonder World Drive overpass will solve that problem.
“For many, many years, when a train came through and stopped, it just cut the town in half,” said Tom Partin, director of EMS for San Marcos. “We always had to station one ambulance on each side of the tracks.”
Partin said he can’t recall any incidents where an ambulance with a critically ill patient was blocked by a train for a significant amount of time, “but the potential was always there.”
“I’ve told people for years that I’ll never see that crossing in my lifetime, and now they’ve made a liar out of me,” he said.
Years of lobbying led to the Texas Transportation Commission’s approval of the project in 1997. Local voters approved bonds to pay for the city’s $1.4 million share in 1998 and construction of the $10 million bridge started in June 2005.
City leaders now are pursuing plans for another overpass over the tracks on the north side of the city, at Aquarena Springs Drive, and a third at the far northern reaches of the city limits, near Yarrington Road.