Stand behind Kern's Food Hall on Chapman Highway this month and you will see a caboose wrapped in a mural, not a construction fence. The tracks that ran alongside it for most of a century are gone. What used to be a working freight line down to Ijams Nature Center is now bare rail bed, cleared and waiting for its final surface, with murals already going up on the walls that face it.
That caboose belonged to B. Ray Thompson, who ran the Shamrock Coal Company and whose name is on Thompson-Boling Arena at the University of Tennessee. Pete Claussen and his family donated it to the trail project, and artist Emmanuel Jarus painted it as the first piece of what is becoming the SoKno Rail Trail and Art Walk. If you have heard about this project and assumed it is still mostly a plan on paper, that assumption is a year or two out of date. Large parts of it are already standing.
Two Projects, Sharing a Half Mile
Here is the part that trips people up. There are two separate construction efforts running along Sevier Avenue right now, and they are not on the same schedule.
The first is the rail trail itself, led by Legacy Parks Foundation with the City of Knoxville and Gulf & Ohio Railways, the company that operated the freight line. The Knoxville City Council adopted the rail-to-trail agreement in September 2025, and by February 2026 crews were pulling up rail and timbers between Ijams and Kern's Food Hall. The finished path will run 3.8 miles from Chapman Highway to Ijams Nature Center, with a 1.5-mile Art Walk concentrated between Kern's and Island Home Park, funded by a $1 million gift from the Lawson Family Foundation and coordinated by Dogwood Arts. That segment is still tracking toward a fall 2026 opening.
The second project is the Sevier Avenue Streetscape Project, a $19.2 million overhaul of the road itself, split roughly $7.9 million from the state and $11.3 million from the city. It covers a new roundabout at Sevier Avenue, Foggy Bottom Street, and Island Home Avenue, buried utilities, and new ADA-compliant sidewalks. This is the one responsible for the lane shifts and orange cones you have probably been driving around. When it broke ground, the city's early estimate had it wrapping by summer 2026. As of the most recent city update, that target has slipped to early 2027, a full construction season later than first announced.
So the orange cones on Sevier Avenue are not a sign that the trail is behind. They belong to a different project with a different owner and a different finish line. If you have been waiting for all the construction on this corridor to clear before you go check out the new trail, you could be waiting well into next year for something that has nothing to do with the trail at all.
What's Already Standing, Not Coming
The trail's art component is further along than a lot of residents realize. Dogwood Arts ran an open call for muralists this year, and installation happened between June 22 and August 28, 2026, covering more than 12,000 square feet across multiple sites along the corridor. Individual stipends for the work exceeded $11,000 per artist. That is not a rendering in a planning document. That is paint already on walls you can walk past today.
Carol Evans, Legacy Parks' executive director, has described what the finished trail will feel like to use:
"This trail becomes a great recreational trail, transportation trail. You'll be able to take strollers on it, bikes and walk. It really celebrates sort of the marble history of the area and the rail history along the way."
The marble reference matters here. This stretch of South Knoxville earned Knoxville the old nickname Marble City, and the trail's design leans into that history rather than covering it over, which is part of why the project has drawn comparisons to New York's High Line among the people building it. You will not find that kind of civic memory on a spec sheet for a subdivision greenway. It is specific to this half mile of river-adjacent rail bed and nowhere else.
The Walk That Already Works
While the trail's Art Walk segment finishes and the streetscape project runs into next year, a different piece of the puzzle is already fully usable: the route into the corridor.
The Gay Street pedestrian bridge reopened on time and within budget, and Knoxville Track Club marked the occasion with a fun run, walk, and bike event in January 2026 that started at Hill Avenue and Gay Street and finished on Sevier Avenue near Davenport Road. With that bridge open, a person can now walk from Bearden through World's Fair Park to Kern's Food Hall to Ijams Nature Center with almost no crossings into vehicle traffic. That is not a future amenity. That is a walk you can take this weekend.
Parking has caught up too. A 72-space lot on Island Home Avenue, tucked beneath the James White Parkway, is now open and sits about a third of a mile from the heart of the Sevier Avenue business district. Add in the roughly 200 spaces near Suttree Landing Park and the more than 300 spaces available in the Regal parking garage on weekends and after 6 p.m. on weekdays, and there is more capacity along this corridor right now than most people driving past the construction signage would guess.
The businesses along the route have not been waiting on the trail to open before showing up for it. Alliance Brewing Company, South Coast Pizza, and Old Sevier Market, all run by the same operator, reported record business through a recent graduation season despite the road work outside their doors. Down the corridor, Angry Dumplings and Tea has been part of the conversation around what the new greenway could mean for foot traffic once it fully connects. Neither business needed the ribbon cutting to keep its regulars coming back.
What This Adds Up To
If you live near Sevier Avenue or anywhere in South Knoxville's Urban Wilderness footprint, here is the honest state of things as of this September:
- The rail bed between Ijams and Kern's is cleared, and murals are already installed along it.
- The Art Walk segment from Kern's to Island Home Park is still on pace for a fall 2026 opening.
- The Sevier Avenue roundabout and utility work will not be finished until early 2027, a year later than the project's original timeline.
- The Gay Street bridge, the Island Home Avenue parking lot, and the walking route from Bearden to Ijams are already open and usable today.
None of this requires you to wait for a single grand-opening date to start using the corridor differently. The trail and the street it parallels are two different clocks, and only one of them is running late.
South Knoxville has spent a decade building its identity around this kind of layered access, the Urban Wilderness trail network, the quarry parks, the greenway spurs that let you get from a neighborhood porch to a wooded trailhead without touching a car. The SoKno Rail Trail is the next piece of that pattern, and unlike a lot of projects that get announced years before anyone can use them, this one has already started showing up in the places people actually walk.
The Creel Group keeps a close eye on projects like this one because they shape how a neighborhood is actually lived in, not just how it is marketed. If you are curious about what a specific stretch of South Knoxville or the surrounding Urban Wilderness corridor might mean for your own plans, The Creel Group is glad to walk through it with you. Schedule a private consultation with the Creel Group whenever you are ready to talk specifics.
