Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield said today he wants to see the city make “substantial progress” toward bringing a passenger train into downtown by the end of his term next year.
Mr. Littlefield, who mentioned the goal in Thursday’s state of the city speech, said he would like to see the project completed “with reasonable cost and in a reasonable amount of time.”
“When people come to Chattanooga, they expect to see something like this, and it’s not here,” he said. “It just goes with the city.”
Mr. Littlefield said he is working with officials at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum to try and get their steam engines to make trips from the museum’s main location on Cromwell Road downtown to the Chattanooga Choo Choo, which serves now as a Holiday Inn hotel.
Tim Andrews, president of the museum, said the organization ran passenger trains to the Choo Choo for several years, but because they had to cross busy Norfolk Southern and CSX rail lines, the attraction became impractical.
Rerouting track to avoid the commercial freight train tracks could cost anywhere from $4 million to $10 million, Mr. Andrews said.
“One of the issues is money,” he said. “We need to find a champion, someone who is interested in trains.”
For complete coverage, see tomorrow’s Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Kelli Gauthier covers K-12 education in Hamilton County for the Times Free Press. She started at the paper as an intern in 2006, crisscrossing the region writing feature stories from Pikeville, Tenn., to Lafayette, Ga. She also covered crime and courts before taking over the education beat in 2007. A native of Frederick, Md., Kelli came south to attend Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism. Before newspapers, ...
And I'd like a pony!
Instead of spending millions on golf-courses and unused "Homeless Campus" property we put that money towards the raises City employees deserve and putting more police on the streets to combat our crime problem.
Ah, forget it, give me a pony!
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