Freight trains stop frequently in York, Alabama, blocking roads and sometimes separating the two neighborhoods for hours. Emergency services and medical personnel cannot enter, and those trapped inside cannot get out.
“People’s livelihoods are endangered because they can’t get to work on time,” said Amanda Brasfield, who lived in one of the neighborhoods, Grant City, for 32 years and raised two daughters there. rice field. “It’s unfair.”
For years, residents have voiced their grievances to the railroad’s owner, the Norfolk Southern Railway, regulators and members of parliament. But the problem only gets worse.
Freight trains frequently block roads across the country, a phenomenon that has been steady over the past decade as railroads run long-distance trains and stop on railroad crossing tracks, local officials said. It is said that it is getting worse.Clogs can rotate school pick-up nightmares, starving customers of local businesses, impede emergency services Do not reach out to those who are suffering.
The freight rail industry wields enormous political and legal power, and despite numerous federal, state, and local government proposals and laws, the problem remains unresolved.
A court overturned several state laws seeking to punish railroad companies for blocking traffic, ruling that only the federal government can regulate railroad crossings. There are no federal laws or regulations that penalize railroads for blocking railroad crossings, and congressional proposals to address the problem have failed to overcome opposition from the railroad industry.
a bipartisan bill The bill, which was introduced to Congress in March after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, called for regulators to “reduce or reduce blocked railroad crossings” for trains carrying dangerous goods. He called for the enactment of rules to “exclude”.
However, this provision was overturned by the Senate Commerce Committee. Altitude bill in May. The bill is awaiting a vote by the entire Senate, but now only requires a National Academy of Sciences study of closed intersections.
Railroad lobbyists urged sympathetic senators to remove the clause, arguing it was irrelevant to the issues raised in the Ohio accident, according to four people familiar with negotiations on the bill. was approaching.
On the day of the committee’s vote, Senator John Tune of South Dakota, the second-ranked Republican in the Senate and a former railroad lobbyist, criticized the pedestrian crossing clause. “The bill should have been about safety reforms related to the derailment in East Palestine, but it has now been expanded into onerous regulatory obligations and a chasing horse for union contributions,” he said. rice field.
The senators who backed the provision agreed to repeal it to further boost Republican support and increase the chances of the bill being passed, the four said.
The freight rail industry is dominated by four US companies: Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, CSX and BNSF, and two Canadian companies: Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National. According to a New York Times analysis of federal lobbying disclosures, U.S. railroad companies and the American Railroad Association, an industry group, have spent about $454 million on federal lobbying over the past two decades. That’s about $30 million more than the four major airlines and their industry group.
Since 2010, Mr. Tune has received about $341,000 in campaign funds from railroad officials and political action committees, according to analysis by OpenSecret, which tracks political money. He served as South Dakota’s railroad commissioner from 1991 to 1993 and worked as a lobbyist for several companies, including the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad, for two years after a failed Senate bid in 2002, according to disclosure documents.
The senator declined to comment.
For former House Democrat Daniel Lipinski from Illinois, the Senate’s reluctance to make deals with the railroad industry came as no surprise.
In 2020 he introduced invoice That would have set a limit on how long railroad companies could block railroad crossings, and penalties would be imposed on trains that exceeded that limit.The idea took shape residential infrastructure bills. But the Senate removed the provision after the American Railroad Association said it had “unintended consequences, including network congestion and service degradation.”
“States and local governments can’t do anything,” said Lipinski, now a consultant and researcher at the University of Dallas and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “The federal government has done nothing about the crossings. The railroad companies want to keep them.”
The Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 provides for: Subsidy for “Railway Crossing Elimination Project”, mainly to set up roads under or over railroad tracks. Local officials said the subsidies could only repair a handful of railroad crossings frequently blocked by freight trains.
No full calculation has been made as to how often trains cut off the country’s more than 200,000 railroad crossings.people can create reports Go to the website maintained by the Federal Railway Administration. Last year he had 30,803 reports, up from 21,648 in 2021.
Texas, Ohio, and Illinois had the most incidents. Some blockages may be reported multiple times, but local officials argue that the database greatly underestimates blockages. York residents say they usually don’t report blocked crossings.
In response to a question, the American Railroad Association blamed local governments for the blocked railroad crossings, which routed roads across the tracks rather than over or under them, as has been the practice in other developed countries. He said he was.
The association’s senior vice president, John Gray, said in a statement that the railroad had taken steps to mitigate the impact of the blocked level crossing. “The real solution is not a question of rail or public sector technology or operational practices,” Gray said. “This is public infrastructure investment similar to what has been done in other developed countries for more than a century and a half.”
Local officials and some railroad workers said the explanations were selfish. They associate the increase in closed intersections with the pursuit of greater profits. Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX and Norfolk Southern have made $96 billion in profits over the past five years, up 13 percent from the last five years. The profit margins of major rail companies are significantly higher than those of companies in most other industries.
Railways have been running longer trains in search of increased efficiency. As a result, as these trains are moved, assembled and exchanged at depots, they often overflow into neighboring areas and block roads, local officials and workers said.
Randy Fannon Jr., national vice-president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Union of Railroad Workers, who also oversees the safety committee, said crews have a better understanding of the space occupied by shorter trains. On a single-track railway, the longer the train, the more difficult it is to maneuver. Such railroads have sections of track, or sidings, that trains can pull aside to allow other trains to pass, Fannon said, but those sections are large enough to accommodate very long trains. It’s not about size.
“If you have two 5,000-foot trains or one 10,000-foot train, you use half the locomotives and half the number of train crews,” he said. “It’s profit that counts.”
In York, trains stop and block the road when using the sidings that run through the city. Residents say the company may move the siding into the surrounding countryside. The Railway Association lists New sidings as a way to deal with blocked intersections with its own material.
“They have no incentive to make that change,” said Willie Lake, mayor of York and former federal bank regulator.
Norfolk South spokesman Connor Spielmaker said in a statement that the company had worked with York to mitigate the disruption. Asked if Norfolk Southern could move the sidings, he declined to comment, but the company already uses sidings outside town and is poised to address issues such as blocked intersections. said.
“The only way to eliminate stops at railroad crossings is to eliminate the crossings themselves,” said Spielmaker. He noted that Norfolk Southern Province wrote a letter to the Department of Transportation in February supporting York’s application for federal grants to build the overpass, and said it would work with York on future grant applications. .
In June, the City of York learned that two federal grant applications had been denied. “This kind of hurts my stomach,” Lake said.
Officials at the transport ministry and one of its agencies, the Federal Railways Administration, declined to say whether rules could be enacted to penalize railways for blocking level crossings. Railroad Administration spokesman Dan Griffin said the railroad should solve the problem even if it wasn’t required.
“The duration and prevalence of blocked level crossings is a result of the operating practices of railway companies,” he said in a statement.
York’s blockage is relentless and sometimes extreme.
On a sweltering election day in June 2022, trains were blocked for more than 10 hours, forcing many people, including the elderly and sick, to evacuate art centers.
Carolyn Turner, 51, said she was often stuck in her neighborhood because of stopped trains and was under great stress after being late for a dialysis appointment 30 miles away. “I like to go out there and come back and help take care of her grandchildren,” she said.
The town’s population is mostly black, which some residents said may be why railroad crossings are often blocked.
“If you really want to see them squirm, say, ‘How many white communities are doing this?'” Army veteran Jesse V. Brown said of South Norfolk executives. Told. The company declined to respond to Brown’s statement.
Some officials are pinning their hopes on the Supreme Court.
at least 37 states have laws regulating blocked intersections, some of which are over 100 years old, some of which the court overturned. Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, other states It asked the Supreme Court to confirm that there may be restrictions on blocked intersections. A court may decide whether to hear the case this fall.
Kitty Bennett Contributed to research.
