(The Columbia State Star published the following story by Jeff Wilkinson on its website on August 28.)
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Midday delays at railroad crossings and horn blasts at midnight — long irritating facts of life in Columbia — could be history.
The S.C. Department of Transportation has received a $5 million federal grant to start a major railroad relocation project along Assembly Street – the first concrete step in a project that has been discussed for two decades.
The $40 million project would eliminate five major crossings between Blossom Street and Rosewood Drive. Also, 20 smaller crossings would disappear from neighborhoods around Assembly.
Motorists could cruise the length of Assembly Street without stopping for a train.
“About 25,000 cars a day will no longer experience delays,” said John Hardee, the Midlands representative on the S.C. Transportation Commission. “And it will yield tremendous safety benefits.”
The project also would eliminate the need for trains to blast their horns several times when traveling though the area – the bane of light sleepers in neighborhoods near Assembly.
The $5 million would pay for a project study and engineering. The study will take about a year, but no timetable for the relocation has been developed.
Transportation officials said they were confident that additional federal money would be available to complete the project.
“It will become a reality,” Hardee said.
Engineers plan to consolidate the tangle of railroad tracks in the area into a single corridor.
A new railroad bridge would be built over Assembly just north of Whaley Street. And two other bridges over Whaley and Rosewood Drive would be improved.
USC president Andrew Sorensen joked that in addition to the improvement to city and university life, “thousands of football fans won’t be late for kickoffs.”
The railroad bridges and key intersections also would be landscaped as part of the project.
“It will make Columbia a little more attractive for people visiting our city as well as for the students who call this home for four years,” City Council member Tameika Isaac said.
Columbia is a hub for two major railroad companies – Norfolk Southern and CSX Transportation.
Trains belonging to both companies haul everything from cars to coal across Assembly at four places from Blossom to Rosewood. Another crossing at Rosewood just off Assembly would be eliminated.
“Columbia has always been a railroad town,” said Norfolk Southern spokesman Frank Macchiaverna “This is a major industrial center for the railroads.”
Macchiaverna said the two railroads would lend support and engineering to the project.
The work involves moving about a mile of CSX track next to the parallel Norfolk Southern tracks.
The idea for the relocation has been tossed around by city and state officials since the 1980s.
This year, though, the proposal made it onto the list of 11 transportation projects the S.C. delegation considered most important. The grant came from South Carolina’s share of federal gas tax dollars.
The work would represent the second major railroad relocation in Columbia.
In 1986, tracks were lowered beneath street level east of Huger Street in a railroad cut popularly known as “The Ditch.” That project cost $28 million.
Ironically, the railroad bridge over Assembly will be at about the same location as a two-lane automobile bridge over the tracks that was torn down in 1957.
Back then, city leaders and state transportation officials considered the bridge a “bottleneck” on Assembly Street, which had been expanded to four lanes.
Rather than spend the money to build a four-lane bridge, they simply tore down the old one, hailing the new grade crossing as a “modern thruway.”
“Traffic can now flow unimpeded the entire length of Assembly from Elmwood Avenue to our football stadium,” A. Mason Gibbs, chairman of the Columbia Chamber of Commerce’s streets committee said at the time in The State.