(The Grand Island Independent published the following Associated Press story by Mark Thiessen on March 30.)
NORTH PLATTE, Neb. — Unsuspecting travelers are no longer startled from their motel beds. Television sets now stay at the same volume through an entire show. And outdoor conversations no longer have to wait for all the racket to end.
For the first time since North Platte was founded by the Union Pacific Railroad 136 years ago, trains have stopped blasting their horns while traveling over the east-west tracks that bisect town.
Thanks to the completion of an extensive system of street viaducts, the city no longer has a railroad crossing. As a result, the 133 trains that pass through each day — one every 10 minutes — no longer are required to announce their presence.
The city recently opened two new quarter-mile-long bridges spanning nine sets of tracks at Poplar Street and three sets on the east end of town at Newberry Street.
The new viaducts, which joined three existing bridges over the tracks, eliminated the need for 1,064 daily train whistles within the city.
“No one has said thanks yet,” Mayor Jim Whitaker said. “I don’t know if it’s dawned on them.”
The change is obvious to those residents who live or work near the busy Poplar Street crossing, where the long waits for motorists have ended.
Paul Huebner, whose family has operated a greenhouse a block from the crossing since 1951, said he doesn’t miss the more than 20 million horns he tolerated for decades.
“It’s made a big difference,” he said. The trains “still rattles the buildings a little, but not the noise.”
The loud horns often meant employees at Huebner’s Lawn and Nursery had to give their customers the silent treatment until each train had passed.
“There’d be times we’d be out here talking to a customer where you would just have to stop,” Huebner said.
And it wasn’t just because of one little toot from a passing locomotive.
Federal law requires every train to blow four warning hours — two long blasts, a short one and then another long one as its engine passes over each road crossing.
North Platte’s series of viaducts not only provide an easy flow of north-south traffic through town, but are part of a larger safety effort.
“There has been a very concerted effort industrywide in working with communities in looking at vehicle flow and looking at what crossings could be closed,” said Mark Davis, a Union Pacific spokesman.
Union Pacific paid $1 million of North Platte’s $3.5 million Poplar Street viaduct, with the city kicking in $750,000 and the state picking up the rest. The state also paid the entire $4 million cost of Newberry Street viaduct because it was just outside city limits.
Not everyone in the North Platte area is now living in peace and quiet. About 2,000 people work at Union Pacific’s noisy rail yard just west of the city.
Engineers still blow horns as trains move throughout the massive, eight-mile-long Bailey Yard, which the railroad claims is the world’s largest rail yard. However, those noises only seem to drift into town when the wind is right.
Generations of local residents have grown accustomed to the clanks, whistles and rumbles of the trains as simply background noise to their daily lives. The community, after all, was built around the railroad.
Union Pacific literally put North Platte on the map when it hired General G.M. Dodge to lay out the town in late 1866. The railroad is not only the largest employer in this community of 23,878, it’s also played a role in the city’s notoriety.
Buffalo Bill Cody lived here and based his famous Wild West Show out of North Platte, using the Union Pacific tracks to transport the animals, crew and props for the show.
During World War II, troop trains brought more than 6 million homesick soldiers to the famous North Platte Canteen where they received homemade sandwiches, magazines and a little conversation and encouragement from local volunteers.