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Now, as I lie awake at night, listening to the resounding whistle blasts, I hear trains, clanking and blustering along the rails. I imagine them bringing supplies to my favorite stores and transporting people from there to here and back. Unfortunately, none of this has really helped me to sleep any better or more than I did before.

Laura Moncur

The good news from the railroad scene this week is that Kansas City Southern Railroad is making progress in its efforts to build bypasses around the cities of Victoria and El Campo.

The bad news? Those lengthy, noisy, long-whistle-blowing freights of the Union Pacific Railroad will not cease their several trips a day through Victoria’s downtown, coming perilously close to a lot of homes and businesses.

A guy (I think he was a plant worker here) once told me, “Jim, you can’t make plastics from distilled water.” And, boy, is that true. The petroleum-based chemicals that do make plastics are toxic to the extreme and, in many cases, highly explosive.

A tank car full of polyvinyl chloride, one of those chemicals, once blew up close enough to me that it put me and about 50 others, mostly firefighters, in the hospital for a long time. Tragically, it killed one firefighter.

That tragedy began with a derailment, and it can happen here.

I also remember a tank car that traveled through Houston decades ago, leaking some kind of toxic stuff that sickened dozens of people before it got out of town.

Anyone the least bit familiar with downtown Victoria knows that the trains coming through on an angle of southeast to northwest, come very, very close to a lot of homes.

Either of the above scenarios, or a combination of the two, and it could be a very bad day for any of us who might be in the vicinity.

I know the railroad does what it can to maintain the tracks in good condition, but the plain truth, as I know from growing up around railroads, is that the tracks sometimes deteriorate to a dangerous point before being noticed and repaired.

And then, there are the horns ... long blast, long blast, short blast, really long blast. That’s the way it goes. And if the engineer uses it annoyingly enough, it can last all the way through town, because of the number of crossings he has to warn.

Either the Texas Department of Transportation, or our city leaders, would be well advised to put some pressure on Union Pacific to follow the lead of the other railroad, and we ain’t just whistling Dixie.

Jim Bishop is a senior editor for the Advocate. Leave him a message at 361-574-1210 or jbishop@vicad.com or comment on this column at VictoriaAdvocate.com.