Elkhart’s efforts to reduce the number of railroad crossings are taking another step forward. The city broke ground Wednesday on a $51 million overpass at Hively Avenue, near South Main Street. It’ll take cars over Norfolk Southern’s busy Chicago Line, which can see 80 to 100 trains a day.
Mayor Rod Roberson said the crossing has long delayed local residents, as well as police and firefighters responding to emergencies. "Now normally, the waits are somewhere in the neighborhood of three to seven minutes," Roberson said. "When seconds matter, three to seven minutes is a long time, and so the safety piece of this is just immeasurable."
The overpass is being funded by a mix of railroad, city, state and federal money. Elkhart Director of Public Works Jeffrey Schaffer said the state recognized the need, when it first awarded grant funding toward the project in 2018.
“This project was one of the highest-rated projects because of the number of cars and the number of trains, along with, unfortunately, a history of accidents at this crossing, with drivers becoming too impatient and going around the gates," Schaffer said.
The project has faced some hurdles, including price increases during the COVID pandemic and a freeze in federal funding last year. Mayor Roberson says it’s a massive project that required quite a bit of property acquisition.
“You can see all of this cleared space were all homes at one time, as well as businesses, and then it goes across the tracks another couple of hundred yards, in order to ensure that we didn’t impede traffic on Sterling," Roberson explained.
Schaffer said South Main Street will remain open for much of the project, but Hively Avenue will have closures. He expects the new overpass to open in November of 2027, with some work continuing into 2028. Roberson says the Lusher Street crossing will close, once the overpass opens.
Elkhart officials say it’s the culmination of 25 years of projects to eliminate grade-level crossings on the busy Norfolk Southern line. Only the Main Street crossing is expected to remain, due to the difficulty of adding another overpass in the downtown area.
