Railroad: Conway area drivers should be prepared to stop for trains

Conway's railroad tracks will no longer be glorified speed bumps.

After four years of inactivity on the local rail line, city and railroad officials say drivers need to get back into the habit of stopping at area crossings and looking for trains.

“Safety’s our No. 1 priority,” said Bill Henderson, vice president of sales and marketing for Kentucky-based R.J. Corman Railroad Co., which purchased the railroad last month. “We care about the community. ... We just want to raise that awareness so that we operate safely and effectively all the time.”

The line’s former owner, the Carolina Southern Railroad, shut down most of its operations in 2011 because the company lacked the resources to bring some of its bridges up to new federal standards.

As the tracks languished, Conway residents asked city officials to remove the stop signs at rail crossings, said City Administrator Bill Graham.

Conway leaders eventually replaced the stop signs with yield markers at tracks on Lakeland Drive, 12th Avenue, E. Cox Ferry Road and Wild Wing Boulevard.

But R.J. Corman’s recent purchase of the railroad has changed things. Graham said the tracks could be in use as early as November.

“We’d have trains running,” he said. “We decided that we would, based on the request of R.J. Corman, go ahead and take the yield signs down and put the stop signs back.”

Graham also said city officials plan to talk with the railroad about installing other safety infrastructure such as lights and crossing arms.

R.J. Corman’s Henderson said he will meet with City Council on Oct. 19 to discuss the railroad’s plans, which include a safety campaign to remind people that trains will soon be running in Conway again.

“The awareness issue is prevalent throughout the rail line,” he said. “It’s been the same way over four or five years. They haven’t seen a locomotive.”

Trains will travel through Horry County at a top speed of 10 miles per hour, but Henderson said the company hopes to one day operate them at 25 mph.

Doing so would cost tens of millions of dollars, money needed to improve tracks and supporting infrastructure. But Henderson said the company plans to work with local governments in applying for federal grants to help cover that expense.

“We would love to do it sooner rather than later,” he said. “But it’s just the investment necessary to improve the infrastructure to accommodate that speed.”

Another decision facing the railroad is whether to restore service to Myrtle Beach. A bridge at the Intracoastal Waterway was vandalized years ago and repairing that structure would be expensive, Henderson said.

R.J. Corman isn’t ruling the idea out, though.

“We’re here to make sure that we restore rail service to the community and that’s the entire community,” Henderson said. “At this point, it’s going to require a significant amount of investment to render it back to where it can be operable again. We’re not opposed to anything like that. ... We will do anything that’s economically feasible and makes economic sense.”

This story was originally published September 25, 2015 at 9:46 AM with the headline "Railroad: Conway area drivers should be prepared to stop for trains."