In Southeastern Idaho, Pocatello’s Center Street Tunnel (underpass) has been around since The Great Depression (1934 to be exact). The Tunnel was built underneath a very busy Union Pacific railyard. The City of Pocatello is supposedly, constantly, repairing the Tunnel. The repair work never lasts long and recently the Tunnel is looking so bad that perhaps it should be permanently shutdown and completely rebuilt.
If you ever hang-out for sometime in and under the Tunnel you’ll hear how impactful the Union Pacific operations are overhead. It seems to me that the Tunnel was not successfully built to handle such railroad induced seismic activities, resulting in never ending taxpayer funded repair projects.
In 2012, the City began the Center Street Railroad Bridge Underpass Project, stating that it is in the “development stage.”
2019, Pocatello updates its “Center Street Underpass Rehabilitation”: https://projects.pocatello.gov/open-house-for-center-street-underpass-improvements/
In 2021, the pedestrian tunnels became an art project: https://www.eastidahonews.com/2021/11/pocatello-center-street-underpass-the-focus-of-ongoing-art-project/
Here is a video I recorded back on 23SEP2023, both ped-tunnels are open and it looks a lot better than it does now:
In 2024, Pocatello revealed, in an update, that Union Pacific has the final say on projects to improve the Tunnel.
In June 2025, the City announced that the final phase of reconstruction will begin in January 2026. The City also contradicts the date when the Tunnel was originally built, now saying it was 1943 during World War Two! Did the person who wrote the City’s press release transpose the numbers? It was in the 2012 press release that the City established the date as 1934.
In this video I made on 28NOV2025, during the Night Lights Parade, the crumbling concrete is very bad, one of the pedestrian tunnels is blocked off and apparently nobody is maintaining the ped-tunnel that is open:
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