White County will be closing all lanes on a portion of Highway 111 Monday to remove the railroad crossing across the road.
Highway 111 will be closed from Fred Hill Road to McMinnville Highway. White County Executive Denny Wayne Robinson said the railroad crossing has become a problem.
“We don’t know really, we think there may be a sink hole or something down there, but it keeps dropping, and the repairs for that are quite expensive to repair a railroad track,” Robinson said. “We are just not having the business on the north side of 111 to offset what it would cost to repair those tracks.”
Robinson said the county will have detour signs up to redirect people around the closure. Robinson said the closure will start at 9am on Monday and anticipates the section will be reopened Tuesday night.
Robinson said he expects traffic to be greatly impacted by the closure as Highway 111 is a heavily trafficked road. Robinson said he encourages everyone to drive safely as they get close to the closure.
“There will be a lot of people, especially that is just passing through, they will be kind of confused and really won’t know which way to go or turn,” Robinson said. “So just be extra aware of your surroundings, be under the anticipation that the person in front of you might not know where they are going.”
Robinson said he believes it’s been about five to six years since a train has gone across the railroad track that runs through Highway 111. Robinson said the county spoke with Co-Op before moving forward with removing the railroad crossing.
“Co-Op is the only business that was getting rail service on the north side of 111,” Robinson said. “And that’s kind of been why its took so long for us to decide this because we wanted to make sure, and Co-Op needed to go through their future plans to make sure they weren’t gonna need it in the future, but they di come back and say that they would not be using rail in the future.”
Robinson said the railroad crossing will be removed and then filled in and paved over. Robinson said T-DOT will be present to make sure the paving is up to state highway standards.
