(The following story by Allen Essex appeared on the Valley Morning Star website on February 9.)
HARLINGEN, Texas — Motorists who must wait at a railroad crossing as seemingly endless freight trains lurch by probably don’t care that 100 years ago, railroads opened up the Lower Rio Grande Valley to the outside world.
Most Valley towns and cities did not exist before the railroad tracks were laid, but now multimillion-dollar projects to move the tracks away from urban areas are being planned in deference to car and truck traffic.
Cost estimates to loop the Union Pacific tracks around Harlingen and San Benito range from $58 million to $61 million, engineer John Hudson said recently.
Although most businesses no longer depend on freight deliveries by rail, companies that deal in bulky products rely on railroads or barge lines to deliver those commodities at the cheapest available price.
Varmicon Industries, 2301 Industrial Crossway, would be greatly affected if the north-south rail line through Harlingen was closed, said company President Ford Barnes.
“We bring cement in by rail,” he said. “It would definitely impact us. We bring in several cars a week.”
His company gets deliveries of cement from Capitol Cement in San Antonio by rail, Barnes said. Varmicon also gets shipments of cement from Cemex (Cementos Mexicanos).
“We sold our barge operation at the Port of Harlingen to Cemex,” Barnes said.
Because Varmicon is at the north edge of Harlingen, he hopes a rail spur could remain to serve his company even if railroad tracks are eventually removed from the rest of the city, Barnes said.
Zarsky Lumber Co., 502 N. First St., gets shipments of lumber by railroad through the downtown rail yards, said Operations Manager Richard Moore. If the railroad tracks were moved outside the city, his company would have to deal with the situation.
“I have an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer with a forklift that hooks on the back, plus a trailer that can haul a bigger forklift. I could go anywhere.”
Matt’s Cash & Carry Building Materials in San Benito would not be affected if the rail lines were moved, said warehouse Manager Javier Zavala. His company gets deliveries of lumber by rail at its Pharr location and hauls lumber to Harlingen by truck, he said.
Mark Davis, Union Pacific Railroad spokesman in Omaha, said railroad relocation projects can sometimes benefit both the railroad and motoring public, but they often take decades to complete, as well as costing millions of dollars.
“In working with the communities on any type of relocation project, all we ask is that we’re included early in the planning stages because we can assist at looking at whether it is even feasible,” Davis said.
Union Pacific’s requirements are that the new route must meet or beat the present transit time, that the railroad can still serve its customers and the design of the new route must be safe, Davis said.
In order to eliminate grade crossings, it is always important to build overpasses or underpasses as part of relocation projects, he said. Rail traffic has increased in recent years in the Brownsville import/export corridor, Davis said.
In the past, vegetables and passengers made up most of the Valley’s railroad business. Now raw materials and manufactured goods moving in and out of Mexico make up most of the freight. And the closest point where a traveler can board an Amtrak train for Chicago or the West Coast is San Antonio, according to Amtrak’s website.
Ten years ago, there were only two trains a day connecting Brownsville with Corpus Christi, but now there are five, Davis said. While passenger trains were once vital to the Valley, offering the easiest and fastest connection to major Texas cities, airlines and multi-lane highways make it easy to get anywhere in the Lone Star State.