Ever been stuck waiting on a train on Hamill Road? Chattanooga leaders are working on a fix — and it could mean never waiting again.

This week, City Council approved $323,750 to go towards a rail overpass between Sarasota Drive and Crescent Club Drive. It would separate train and vehicle traffic, allowing drivers to pass underneath without waiting.

Why it’s needed

The Hamill Road crossing has been ranked among the worst in Tennessee for train blockages. In 2024, the city installed a monitoring system to track how often it was happening. Here’s what they found:

~30 train blockages per day
Average delay: just over 5 minutes
Longest delay: nearly 5 hours
~700 blockages longer than 10 minutes in the first year

Beyond a headache

The delays aren’t just frustrating — they can impact emergency response times for the nearby CommonSpirit Memorial Hospital and create a bottleneck in the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant evacuation zone.

The current status

The funding approved by the City Council will build on a $1.62 million federal grant that was secured in 2024. It covers early engineering work, so there’s no construction timeline yet. We’ll keep an eye on what comes next.