A sinkhole discovered beneath the railroad crossing at Eslava Street has city and railroad engineers scrambling to figure out what caused the ground to give way, and how long it will take to fix it for good.
The hole, roughly three feet deep and five feet wide, opened up near the tracks just south of the Alabama Cruise Terminal. The crossing has since been blocked off to vehicle traffic, though freight trains hauling heavy cargo have continued to roll through the area without interruption.
Crews with CSX, the rail company that operates the line, first noticed the pavement around the crossing beginning to crumble. A closer look revealed a sinkhole had formed underneath both the roadway and the tracks themselves. Engineers from the City of Mobile and CSX are now working together to pin down exactly what triggered the collapse.
A CSX spokesperson said the immediate hole has already been filled so that trains can keep moving safely through the crossing, but a full rebuild of the crossing itself will have to wait until the underlying cause is identified and addressed. No firm timeline has been given for when that permanent fix will happen.
That uncertainty is a real headache for at least one nearby business owner. Ralph Atkins runs Southern Fish and Oyster Co., the only business sitting on the east side of the tracks at that crossing. With the road blocked, his customers have had to find another way in — something Atkins said has already cost him business, particularly from people driving in from out of town who simply give up when they hit the closure and don’t know an alternate route. He’s posted his own detour sign near Royal Street to help steer regulars around the blocked crossing, though he said new customers unfamiliar with the area often just turn around.
Atkins pointed out the irony of the situation: heavy freight trains weighing around 100 tons continue rolling across the crossing at roughly 40 miles per hour, even as the same stretch of pavement was judged too unstable for ordinary passenger vehicles.
The sinkhole sits only a couple hundred feet from the Mobile River and below the water table, which is part of what makes diagnosing the problem so tricky. According to the city’s engineering staff, two drainage pipes run underneath the rail line at that spot — one shallow enough to inspect directly, and another buried far deeper below the waterline that is much harder to reach because the area is tidally influenced. City engineers say they’ve been investigating the site for roughly two weeks already.
Engineers explained that aging drainage pipes can slowly create hidden voids in the soil over years, and that heavy rain events often expose those voids once they finally give way. That pattern echoes what happened after this spring’s record rainfall, when two large sinkholes opened up in west Mobile along McGregor Avenue near Dauphin Street and Girby Road.
For now, city officials say the approach is a methodical one: rule out potential causes one at a time until the real source of the problem is found, so the crossing can be rebuilt with confidence it won’t simply reopen the same hole again.