CN Rail has given its Natchez to Brookhaven, Mississippi line a temporary repreive by agreeing to hold off abandoning the route for at least a year.

The line's death knell was quelled in part by the reopening of the Georgia-Pacific paper mills in Roxie and Gloster, MS. Those mills have been reopened after more than a year of dormancy to process the timber felled by Hurricane Katrina, and company officials have said they hope to keep the plants open indefinitely.

Two counties that stand to benefit by the rail line's resurgence are Natchez and Adams, both of which will use the next year to try and lure other business and industry to relocate along the line and keep service levels up.

As EDA chairman Woody Allen noted, industries often want to know about two things: the port and the railroad, the crucial means of transportation for many manufacturing companies.

Now that we have the time, we need to use it. We need to continue working with the Mississippi Department of Transportation, whose director Larry L. "Butch" Brown certainly knows how important the rail line is to his hometown, and we need to continue pressing industries to locate here in our community. When it comes to transportation and industry, we can't have one without the other.