U.S. Congressman Jim Jordan, standing left, introduces himself to Darren Dillon, a local train master for CSX railroad. Jordan and Dillon were part of a Wednesday meeting designed to bring residents, government and emergency officials and railroad officials together to discuss repeated road closures caused by stopped trains.
(Journal-Tribune photo by Mac Cordell)
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Dozens of city, township, county, state and federal officials, as well as residents and representatives from CSX, gathered Wednesday to discuss the increasing concern about trains blocking roads in the community.
Officials said there are multiple roads in several townships that are having the problems.
Union County Sheriff Jamie Patton said his office tries to keep a database of all railroad crossing blockages.
He said that for a period, calls were coming to his office “hourly.” Officials said roads will be blocked for hours at a time, noting Warner Road was closed for 24 hours while a train sat unoccupied because the crew had exhausted their work hours. Other crossings are blocked because of problems getting trains into Honda.
Patton said he tried to deal with CSX officials, but the problem wasn’t being resolved.
“We eventually went to the prosecutor’s office in an attempt to address those issues,” Patton said.
County Prosecutor Dave Phillips said his office is “somewhat limited” on what it can do since railroads fall under federal guidelines. He said he was able to prosecute 15 cases of Obstruction of Roads by a Railroad. CSX was found guilty and paid $3,000 in fines. The maximum possible fine is $1,000 per conviction. Phillips said there were “many, many more” offenses that were not prosecuted as part of an agreement with the train company.
Rusty Orben, with CSX, said the train company is trying to resolve the problems but, “frankly, there is just too many crossings on the network.”
“We control the things we can control to reduce that impact and limit the exposure for the community at that crossing that’s impacted, but at some point, when we’ve done everything we can operationally, it now kind of becomes a public issue,” Orben said.
Jerome Township Fire Chief Doug Stewart said there was a road blocked for 24 hours with “no notification to any of the emergency services.” He called it “inexcusable.”
“If we aren’t notified, sometimes I can’t get my trucks turned around on a country road and it delays the life-saving services that we provide on a daily basis, so you are actually impeding my job to my citizens,” Stewart said. “If you notify us, we can go another route. But you are getting in the way of us providing a service that our taxpayers demand of us.”
He added, “all you have to do is give us a notification that it is going to be blocked.”
Fire officials from Marysville, as well as Liberty and Allen townships, echoed that request.
CSX Trainmaster Darren Dillon said he has provided his phone number to the sheriff’s office. If they know of blocked crossings, they can call him.
County Commissioner Steve Stolte said the engineer can identify issues in real time, down to specific driveways and traffic patterns from his office. He asked why the train company couldn’t use that type of technology to identify blockages and notify the sheriff’s office.
Orben said CSX has many trains and many miles of track to monitor.
“These kinds of problems are not unique to Marysville or Union County. They are everywhere,” Orben said.
Orben said train dispatchers are too busy to identify when a train is blocking the roadway or to contact emergency personnel and warn them about the road being closed. He said if dispatchers had to watch for trains blocking roads, “they would never get off the phone” and wouldn’t be able to do other jobs. He said using GPS signals on the train to identify stopped trains blocking the road is also “not practical.”
Safety officials said if there is a crash, personnel on the train call to report it. Officials asked why those same people couldn’t call the sheriff’s office or local emergency responders if they were blocking the road. Orben said he didn’t want that to happen because it could take too long for personnel to get the message.
He added that the question becomes, “What does the public want to see at these crossings.”
Orben said that if the public wants to completely eliminate the chance for a blockage, there are two options — permanently closing the crossing with traffic diverted around the crossing or building bridges for the trains.
“There are alternatives out there, the problem is, some of them can be quite expensive,” Orben said.
He said Indiana recently approved an initiative to pay for railroad bridges. He said if the citizens locally or statewide would pay for bridges for trains to run on, they wouldn’t need to worry about the blocked roads.
Phillips said today that he is talking with state officials to increase the penalty provisions for companies that block roads.